This is infuriating. Arizona Republicans should pay to replace the voting machines.

The partisan firm auditing the November votes broke the “chain of custody” for machine possession, raising tampering concerns, the secretary of state said.

Arizona’s secretary of state informed Maricopa County officials Thursday that hundreds of the state’s vote-tabulating machines should no longer be used because of their handling by the inept, partisan company hired by Senate Republicans to recount ballots cast in November’s presidential election.

The machines should not be used again because there is no way of knowing whether they were tampered with while out of the county’s custody and under the control of Senate Republicans and the controversial Cyber Ninjas company conducting the recount, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, she said in a letter to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors.

New machines reportedly could cost the state millions of dollars.

It’s the latest astonishing snafu in a circus recount of 2.1 million Maricopa County votes by a company that has no experience with ballots or elections and that is run by a right-wing conspiracy theorist who was convinced months ago that any audit would turn up hundreds of thousands of votes for Donald Trump.

The Ninjas are subjecting ballots to ultraviolet light in a crackpot hunt for bamboo fibers, which they are convinced would be evidence of tampering by China.

Hobbs said a strict “chain of custody” procedure to safeguard the integrity of votes was broken when the county was forced last month to turn over voting machines to Senate Republicans and the Cyber Ninjas, who then had total control without supervision. Critics are convinced that countless ballots have already been altered, stolen, trashed or gone missing.

Such a break in the chain of custody constitutes a serious “cyber incident to critical infrastructure — an incident that could jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity and availability of digital information,” Hobbs warned. Access must be strictly limited and tracked, she noted, but Cyber Ninjas’ procedures, “if any,” are unknown, and “troubling security lapses” have been witnessed.

[huffpost.com]