Supervisors in Arizona’s largest county on Wednesday approved an amended contract with Dominion Voting Systems that will see the company send over fresh election equipment.
Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors opted to lease new voting system tabulators to replace machines examined by auditors hired by the Arizona Senate.
The board, composed of four Republicans and one Democrat, agreed in a meeting to allocate an additional $2.9 million to the contract with Dominion Voting Systems. The contract now totals $9 million. It began in June 2019 and runs through July 2022 and has the county leasing voting equipment from Dominion.
The Canada-based company provides such equipment to 28 states and Puerto Rico.
The company will provide 385 new precinct tabulators, or machines that count ballots at precincts, and 9 new central counters, as well as the hardware required to run them.
“The ‘Subpoenaed Equipment’ will no longer be used by the county and the county is authorizing the contractor to remove, inspect and properly dispose of the ‘Subpoenaed Equipment,’” the amendment states. “The county will acquire new voting system components to replace the Subpoenaed Equipment pursuant to the existing lease terms of the Agreement.”
Board Chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican, said needing to spend more money on the contract was frustrating but necessary after auditors took custody of the machines.
“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 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 in a statement. “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.”
