Voting Machines In Pennsylvania County Decertified Due To 2020 Election Audit Effort

A number of voting machines in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, have been decertified by the state.

Fulton County, a deep-red Republican county located in southern Pennsylvania, previously disclosed they had allowed a software firm to inspect voting machines at the behest of local Republican lawmakers as part of a 2020 election “audit,” according to the Associated Press (AP). Pennsylvania Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid announced Wednesday that the voting machines the software firm accessed are decertified from further use, The AP reported.

PA’s top election officials have decertified Fulton County’s voting machines after they were compromised in a post-election inspection done by a third party company called Wake TSI earlier this year.

— Lucy Perkins (@lucyeperk) July 21, 2021

Degraffenreid claimed that the inspection, as part of the 2020 audit, violated state law in a Wednesday letter to Fulton County officials. She claimed the software firm, a West Chester-based company called Wake TSI, had “no knowledge or expertise in election technology,” according to The AP.

“I have no other choice but to decertify the use of Fulton County’s leased Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5A voting system last used in the November 2020 election,” Degraffenreid reportedly wrote in the letter. (RELATED: All Voting Machines Go Down In 1 Georgia County)

The move will force Fulton County to either buy new voting machines to replace the ones evaluated by Wake TSI or lease new ones as it did in the May primaries, The AP noted.

In other Fulton County (PA) voting machine election news…

Another “audit” by untrained third party group leads to decertification of equipment.https://t.co/GqzmHnX79o

— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) July 21, 2021

As part of the audit performed by Wake TSI, the software company took backups of system data on computers used to count ballots — among other things — under the supervision of the county’s information technology director, according to a letter Fulton County officials wrote to Degraffenreid in May, The AP reported.

In the 2020 presidential election, less than 8,000 people voted in the county, with voters breaking for former President Donald Trump by almost seven-to-one over President Joe Biden, the AP reported.

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