Maricopa County Board of Supervisors held a meeting last night and voted to purchase more Dominion voting machines blaming the reason for this on the Arizona Senate’s audit of the County’s 2020 election.
We reported yesterday that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors would meet last night and discuss among other items the purchase of more electronic voting machines from Dominion. This meeting took place.
The Board held their meeting last night to discuss purchasing new voting machines for the County. This is before the audit of the 2020 results is even complete. Rather than waiting to see what makes most sense the Board held their meeting and discussed the purchase.
The Board of Supervisors held their meeting and shared the following – a video of their call can be found here – the discussion of points 108 and 109 of their agenda start at the 40:40 minute mark with Supervisor Hickman sharing:
The [voting] equipment that we used in 2020 is now in the hands of Cyber Ninjas…. This is not our choice to do what we have to do here today, it was made by the state Senate. We made it very clear to them that if they provided these election machines to people who were not certified to operate them, that these machines cannot be used again. We made it very clear to them. They knew it going into it.
They chose to utilize the Cyber Ninjas, that was number one. Number two, the secretary of state who has the statutory ability to decide which machines can be used and which machines can’t, told us very clearly in a letter that those machines that have been in the hands of the Cyber Ninjas – we can’t use them again. That wasn’t our decision either. These are decisions made by others. Based on decisions made by others we need to move forward here. We need to have elections equipment that we can utilize to run elections here in 21′ and into 22′. So that’s the basis for this.
I think it is fundamentally unfair for the tax payers of Maricopa County to be responsible for footing this bill and I will note to everyone that before we turned over this election equipment President Karen Fann signed an agreement that said that if the taxpayers of Maricopa County incurred costs as to what’s going on at the Coliseum, the Senate would cover those costs.
Next Supervisor Chucri said that they had to purchase Dominion machines because the Secretary of State claimed they could no longer be used in an election.
Chucri said he was a businessman and he makes business decisions. Any businessman who would simply purchase millions of dollars of equipment because Katie Hobbs said so without determining why the machines were no longer functioning after having been inspected and audited by Cyber Ninjas is an ignorant businessman. Who in their right mind would take Katie Hobbs at her word?
But there are a number of issues with the Supervisors’ decision to purchase millions more in Dominion equipment.
1. The machines were not certified for the 2020 election –
2. If the machines were no longer certified per Secretary of State Hobbs then why not request what needs to be done to recertify the machines?
3. If they cannot be recertified after an audit, then why purchase more of the same machines and why not look into purchasing machines that aren’t so expensive and fragile.
Supervisor Gallardo then said the audit was all about Trump trying to raise money. He also mentioned this is the first of many garbage complaints coming down the pike.
