Kari Lake, who is currently running for US Senate in Arizona, is still refusing to let her 2022 gubernatorial loss go. On Thursday, the Republican candidate filed a petition to the Supreme Court arguing that electronic voting should be ruled unconstitutional, and this time around, she’s got a new partner in crime: MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell.
The lawsuit stems from the leadup to the 2022 election, when Lake, along with local secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, sued Maricopa County, seeking to ban electronic vote counters, which they alleged were theoretically “hackable.”
The suit was dismissed in August of 2022, with a judge deeming the litigation a “frivolous” waste of time and slapping Lake and Finchem’s lawyers with $122,000 in sanctions. The penalty, wrote Judge John Tuchi, would “make clear that the Court will not condone litigants … furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process.” Both Lake and Finchem went on to lose their elections.
An appeals court upheld the dismissal last October, ruling that the suit “relies on a ‘long chain of hypothetical contingencies’ that have never occurred in Arizona.”
But that has done little to damper Lake’s enthusiasm for challenging election results, and now she’s joined by Lindell, who has made a name for himself as one of the most high-profile promulgators of false claims about voting machines. The MyPillow CEO spent much of last week hyping the lawsuit, making multiple appearances on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast—in between plugs for his percale sheets—to tease “the most explosive evidence ever” that is “going to save this country” and “shock the world,” The Arizona Republic reported.
According to the petition to the court, “New evidence from other litigation and public-record requests shows defendants made false statements to the district court regarding the safeguards allegedly followed to ensure the accuracy of the vote, on which the district court relied” in its August 2022 decision.
“That enables petitioners to seek to amend their allegations on standing…to show a non-speculative likelihood that the same harms will recur in future elections, which harms did indeed occur in the 2022 election,” lawyers for Lake and Finchem argued.
Yet local election officials and legal experts quickly cast doubt on whether the suit was much of anything. “Nothing new,” Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer told The Arizona Republic on Friday. “Same old crazy. Zero percent chance the United States Supreme Court decides to spend its very limited time on something so crazy that it got sanctioned to the tune of $100,000-plus at the trial court level.”
Notre Dame law professor Derek Muller told The Arizona Mirror that the case is “a longshot,” given that Lake and Finchem have “not suffered any concrete or particularized harm.” Muller predicted that the court would both decline to hear the case and offer no comment on its reasons for refusal.
While there’s little likelihood that the suit will end in legal success for Lake, it does seem to be setting the stage for her to sow doubt about the results of yet another election. “The weakness in voting infrastructure requires resolution before the 2024 election,” wrote her attorneys. “Without resolution, election results in the numerous states with Dominion voting machines — at the very least — cannot be trusted.” Dominion, it’s worth remembering, is the voting systems company that Fox agreed to pay $787 for defamation after the network spread false claims about its machines during the 2020 election.
The irony is that Lake is making these claims as she attempts—rhetorically at least—to appeal to the more moderate Republican voters she famously derided during her 2022 campaign, when she bragged about driving “a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.” After Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she wasn’t seeking re-election earlier this month, Lake called McCain “an incredible veteran.”
“Anybody who wants to vote for me, anybody who in the past hasn’t, I’ve extended an olive branch,” she said. “We’ve got to come together.”
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