Former GOP candidates for statewide office Kari Lake and Mark Finchem lost their federal appeal in their effort to ban voting machines and will still have to pay a six-figure sanction in the case.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted in a 12-page ruling on Monday that "none" of Finchem's and Lake's allegations support the idea that future elections could be marred because of electronic ballot-tabulation machines. They only presented "conjectural" claims that relied on a series of hypothetical circumstances "that have never occurred in Arizona" but which needed to take place if the court was to find any harm to the plaintiffs, the ruling states.
Finchem and Lake are no longer candidates for the 2022 election and have no standing to sue, the appeals court ruled, nor did they present any evidence they had been harmed by the county's actions in using voting machines.
"In any event," the ruling says, "the district court correctly held that Plaintiffs, who claim no past injury, failed to establish that a future injury was either imminent or substantially likely to occur."
Neither Finchem nor Lake returned calls or responded to questions about whether they'd appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The only thing worse than coming into court with no facts is coming with no standing: either way, it's not going to be a good day," said Tom Liddy, a deputy county attorney who served as one of the county lawyers defending against the anti-machine case.
Lake, who's now running for the U.S. Senate , and Finchem claimed in the lawsuit filed in April 2022 that ballot tabulation machines were untrustworthy and shouldn't be used without running "objective" tests. Their complaint echoed conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and vote-tabulating machines put forth by former President Donald Trump and his legal team after he lost to Biden in 2020, and they both used the claim of voting problems in an attempt to bolster their 2022 campaigns for governor and secretary of state, respectively. Lake lost by more than 17,000 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and Finchem lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes by more than 120,000 votes.
Tuchi, after ruling against what he deemed their "frivolous complaint" in December, ordered the lawyers for Finchem and Lake to pay sanctions for bringing their evidenceless arguments to a court of law. The sanction amount of $122,200 was finalized in July .
Finchem has taken initial steps to run for the state Senate in the Prescott-centered Legislative District 1, though it's unclear if he lives in the district . He's listed a mobile home as an address in Prescott but also has two addresses listed in Maricopa County, where he apparently considered running for county recorder against fellow Republican Stephen Richer this year.
Lake is still awaiting a ruling in a lawsuit she filed earlier this year challenging her lost election based on the idea that the county's ballot signature verification process was flawed. A two-day trial was held in late September over her demands that the county release 1.3 million ballot envelopes signed by voters. Lake has a separate, failed election challenge pending in the state appellate court.
Liddy noted that the 9th Circuit agreed that Maricopa County elections had "robust safeguards" to protect the integrity of elections.
"The reality is that the 9th Circuit upheld that there is no evidence of anybody ever hacking into Maricopa County election machines," Liddy said. "The people of Arizona should be confident in the electoral process provided to them by the Arizona Legislature and administered by the 15 counties."
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