How G.O.P. Election Evaluations Created a New Safety Risk

Safety specialists say that election {hardware} and software program needs to be subjected to transparency and rigorous testing, however solely by credentialed professionals. But almost all the partisan critiques have flouted such protocols and centered on the 2020 outcomes slightly than trying to find safety flaws.

In Arizona, the agency chosen by the Republican-led Legislature, Cyber Ninjas, had no earlier expertise auditing elections, and its chief govt has promoted conspiracy theories claiming that rigged voting machines price Mr. Trump the state. The corporate additionally used Republican partisans to assist conduct its evaluation in Maricopa County, including one former lawmaker who was on the Jan. 6 protest in Washington that preceded the Capitol riot.

In Wisconsin, the Republican Meeting speaker, Robin Vos, is pushing for a evaluation of the 2020 outcomes to be led by a former State Supreme Courtroom justice who claimed in November that the election had been stolen. And in Pennsylvania, the Republican chief of the State Senate has introduced hearings that he likened to a “forensic investigation” of the election, saying it might embrace issuing subpoenas to grab voting machines and ballots.

Christopher Krebs, the previous head of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company, mentioned such critiques might simply compromise voting machines. “The primary concern is having somebody unqualified are available and introduce danger, introduce one thing or some malware right into a system,” he mentioned. “You have got somebody that accesses this stuff, has no thought what to do, and when you’ve reached that time, it’s extremely tough to sort of roll again the certification of the machine.”

Decertifying machines successfully means changing them, usually in a rush and at nice price. Philadelphia’s elections board rejected an earlier G.O.P. request for entry to the town’s election machines, saying it could price greater than $35 million to purchase new ones.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, advised Maricopa County in Might that her workplace would decertify 385 machines and 9 vote tabulators that had been handed over for the G.O.P.-led election evaluation.

“The difficulty with the tools is that the chain of custody was misplaced,” Ms. Hobbs mentioned in an interview. “The chain of custody ensures that solely approved folks have entry to it, in order that that vulnerability can’t be exploited.”