Fulton County will postpone its inspection of county-leased voting machines until mid-January.

The county, in a Commonwealth Court hearing Tuesday, agreed to not allow a third-party inspection of its electronic vote-tallying machines until Jan. 10 after originally planning to conduct one Wednesday.

Tom King, a Butler attorney, argued on behalf of Fulton County.

Fulton plans to comply with a request from the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, which is conducting a “forensic investigation” of the 2020 presidential election. The Senate committee contracted Iowa-based Envoy Sage, which has no known history of conducting election investigations, to inspect Fulton's and other counties' machines.

The hearing comes in the midst of litigation between the county and state over Wake TSI's inspections of Fulton's voting machines, conducted this summer, and the state's subsequent decertification of the Fulton machines.

The state moved to block Fulton's participation Wednesday in the audit, claiming the county's planned investigation risks manipulating or destroying evidence. Robert Wiygul, an attorney representing the secretary, said Fulton's planned Wednesday inspection did not sufficiently detail the plans to alleviate concerns over the destruction of evidence.

“If someone else conducts an examination, particularly under the lack of standards and protocols that we have here, then, yes, there is a significant risk (the info will be altered), so it will no longer be possible for us to determine .. what the state of the equipment and data was following Wake TSI's examination,” Wiygul said.

King characterized the fight between Fulton and Pennsylvania as a David-and-Goliath battle, motivated by politics rather than the law.

“What was done here was done properly by Fulton County,” he said. “They didn't do anything wrong, and they got punished.”