PHOENIX — 12News is verifying a question from viewer Kristin Bolick, who asked, "Are our voting machines safe after Cyber Ninjas did their inspection of our voting machines in Maricopa County? There was no fraud found in the 2020 election, but could Cyber Ninjas have done something nefarious to our voting machines?"
Our sources are the Maricopa County Recorder's Office and the Arizona Secretary of State's Office.
The Cyber Ninjas was a company contracted by Arizona Senate Republicans to do an audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.
It was the beginning of the false idea that the election was stolen or otherwise corrupted.
Cyber Ninjas had no experience or qualifications to run an election audit.
However, during the so-called audit, Senate Republicans forced the county to give Cyber Ninjas their voting equipment.
Those machines are highly guarded and protected.
Once they were out of the county’s control, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs told the county commissioners that the only safe way to deal with the machines was to replace them.
She wrote, “Loss of custody constitutes a cyber incident to critical infrastructure."
“Any election equipment that is handled by anybody outside of Maricopa County has the ability to be damaged or broken," Deputy Elections Director Jennifer Liewer said. "In order to ensure that these machines were not damaged in a way that we weren't aware of, we felt it was necessary to replace them.”
The county had to buy all new voting machines for $2.8 million.
So we can verify that nothing the Cyber Ninjas did with the voting machines can affect the upcoming election because those machines are no longer in service.
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