Two Arizona lawmakers are seeking an injunction to prevent the state from using electronic voting machines in November, arguing they are not secure and fail to meet the constitutional and statutory mandates to guarantee a free and fair election.
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Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and state Rep. Mark Finchem, both Republicans, claim that the machines are untrustworthy since the companies that manufacture them have refused to make their system and software open to the public and therefore are in violation of the 14th Amendment.
The injunction they are seeking is tied to an April lawsuit they filed calling on a jury to toss the machines.
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“Computerized equipment is vulnerable to manipulation by unauthorized persons, meaning the true results of an election that relies upon computerized equipment can never be known,” their lawyer, Andrew Parker, said.
The two candidates claim that the machines have “glaring cybersecurity vulnerabilities,” including allowing for possible remote access, unmonitored network communications, and containing secret content.
Arizona has been ground zero for election conspiracy theories following Joe Biden’s 2020 razor-thin win in the state against then-President Donald Trump. The “Big Lie,” a belief that the election was “stolen,” has centered on the evidence-free theory that the state’s ballot-counting machines were rigged to switch votes from Trump to Biden.
Trump was only the second Republican presidential nominee to lose Arizona since 1948, due almost entirely to Biden carrying Maricopa County. Following the election night results, Trump and his supporters immediately called foul and demanded recounts.
In Maricopa, no discrepancies were found either in a hand count audit, which took place on Nov. 4, 2020, or in an additional physical hand recount of 47,000 ballots that took place between Nov. 7, 2020, and Nov. 9, 2020. On Feb. 23, 2021, Maricopa County announced that forensic audits of their vote tabulation equipment by two independent auditors had found no irregularities.
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A month later, Arizona state Senate President Karen Fann hired Cyber Ninjas to audit the 2020 election. The firm said it found some flaws and other vulnerabilities in the voting machines.
Since then, controversy has swirled over who and how the audit was conducted. For example, the hand recount was managed by Wake Technology Services, which had been hired to conduct an audit in a rural Pennsylvania county by then-Trump attorney Sidney Powell. The company, until then, had primarily worked in the healthcare sector with little to no experience with elections.
Lake’s and Finchem’s claims are based on allegations from states including Georgia, Wisconsin, and Colorado but “not Arizona or Maricopa County,” Emily Craiger, lawyer for Arizona’s most populous county, said in a recent 21-page legal filing.
She told Judge John Tuchi that allegations that the machines have been tampered with because of “foreign manufacturing of components by hostile nations” are too generic and meritless to even consider. She added that Arizona law requires multiple checks of counting equipment before and after each election and that there are random hand counts of selected races to compare the tally conducted by members of both major parties with what the machine recorded.
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Craiger also argued that Lake’s and Finchem’s claims are with issues stemming from machine-counting of ballots that go back nearly two decades.
“Yet plaintiffs waited until April 22, 2022 — when both were running for statewide office — to file suit,” Craiger said, adding that their complaints are also beyond the two-year statute of limitations. “Apparently, raising these concerns was not politically expedient during the limitations period.”
Opponents of using machines to count ballots have said they should be counted by hand. However, experts said it’s less accurate than a machine count and would take much longer. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, head of elections operations, estimated that it would take 2.2 million hours to hand-count the ballots for the 2022 midterm elections in Maricopa.
