Arizona county will spend $3 million to replace voting machines tainted by the state Senate's unnecessary election audit

• Maricopa County will spend millions to replace the voting machines that state Senate Republicans ordered to be turned over for an audit of 2020 election results.
• The county will buy new voting equipment and destroy the old machines that were subpoenaed for the audit, The Arizona Republic reported.
• Officials had warned that the machines turned over for the audit would likely be unsafe since the chain of custody had been broken.

Arizona's most populous county will spend nearly $3 million to replace the voting machines that state Senate Republicans ordered to be turned over for a needless audit of 2020 election results, reports said.

Maricopa County will buy new voting equipment and destroy the old machines that were subpoenaed for the audit, The Arizona Republic reported.

The county announced last month that it would not again use most of the voting equipment involved in the audit and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously for the new funding, according to the news outlet.

Officials had warned that the machines turned over for the audit would likely be unsafe since the chain of custody had been broken and there would be no way to determine if any had been tampered with, according to the Arizona Republic.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers released a statement after Wednesday's board meeting saying, "The frustrating thing is, those were perfectly good machines which passed all of our accuracy tests from the time we first got them in 2019," the newspaper reported.

"The taxpayer paid good money for them, but now this equipment will have to be decommissioned because the Senate didn't take our warnings about chain-of-custody seriously," Sellers said.

The chairman continued, "When Senate leadership chose novices to conduct their audit rather than reputable, certified companies, they wasted an expensive investment that had served Maricopa County voters well in 2019 and 2020."

A report from election experts last month said that the audit of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County "lacks the essential elements" of a credible review and its findings should not be trusted.

State Senate Republicans subpoenaed to get access to Maricopa County's voting machines following the baseless claims by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him.