Class A bull**** !!! Before the Senate took control of the machines, the Sec of States office had the software on the machines ( along with a hash of the software ) put in escrow. When the machine are returned, all they have to do is take a hash of the software. If it didn’t change, it was not tampered with.
You are correct. The Democrats and their RINO friends are claiming that they don't have the ability to determine if the software on the machines is the correct, Dominion installed software or not. But that's an incredible admission if they aren't just lying.
If they really can't determine if the software on the machines is correct, then they never have known what software is on the machines, and they can't even run the tests that were supposedly run when the machines were certified.
So we have the Arizona Secretary of State either admitting that they can't determine if the Dominion machines they used in 2020 were actually running the EAC certified software, and therefore they can't test the machines now, or that the hashes published by Dominion and the US government are not sufficient to validate that the software on the machines is correct.
As you noted, if they were ever able to validate that the correct set of executable files were on the machine they should be able to re-run the same test to validate that the machines still have the same code present.
If they can't validate the code now then they never could, since the hash values needed are in a public document published by the US Government.