Kari Lake and Mark Finchem should face sanctions for those rants that pass for lawsuits

We now know what it cost Maricopa County to defend against the frivolous lawsuit Kari Lake and Mark Finchem foist upon the courts earlier this year:

In dollars, at least.

$141,690.

That’s the amount Maricopa County wants from the attorneys who filed Lake’s and Finchem’s campaign stunt of a lawsuit – the April one, in which they demanded a hand count of all ballots in this year’s election.

U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi threw out the Lake/Finchem lawsuit over the summer, noting they provided no evidence of a problem and no proof that a hand count of ballots would be more accurate than a machine count. Last week, he ordered sanctions against Lake’s and Finchem’s lawyers, noting that “false, misleading, and speculative allegations” do not equal evidence.

“Imposing sanctions in this case is not to ignore the importance of putting in place procedures to ensure that our elections are secure and reliable,” Tuchi wrote. “It is to make clear that the court will not condone litigants ignoring the steps that Arizona has already taken toward this end and furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process.”

Speaking of furthering false narratives and evidence-free lawsuits, Maricopa and Mohave County Superior Court judges will spend most of next week hearing four more of them.

When they’re done and the lawsuits are inevitably dismissed, at least a few of those judges should follow Tuchi’s example, allowing taxpayers to recoup of some of the cost of defending against the election tantrums.

Sen. Sonny Borrelli sued Maricopa County, claiming that Mohave County voters were disenfranchised because Maricopa County used artificial intelligence to verify early ballot signatures. Maricopa says every signature is verfied by a human being.

Mark Finchem, Abe Hamadeh and Kari Lake each have filed their own election challenges, offering up a broad array of reasons why judges should throw out the election results. Finchem’s and Lake’s lawsuits, in particular, read more like a pair of Twitter rants than actual lawsuits.  Lots of woulda coulda speculation but nothing in the way of anything that approaches actual evidence that would change the vote counts.

Lake claimed, among other things, that there were “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots” in Maricopa County, that “thousands of Republican voters” were disenfranchised, that “tens of thousands” of early ballots with mismatched signatures were counted, that printers were “susceptible to hacking” and that printer failures were “intentional”.

What she didn’t offer was evidence to back up any of that.

"Plaintiff’s 70-page Complaint and its 7,254 pages of exhibits ... give the impression that Plaintiff has a mountain of evidence supporting her extraordinary demands to overturn an election," Maricopa County's lawyer, Karen Hartman-Tellez, wrote in the s lacounty's motion to dismiss filed Thursday. But the factual allegations and exhibits are largely irrelevant to issues properly before the court in an election contest, mostly based onunwarranted speculation, and do not stand up to even the barest of scrutiny."

Lake did offer statements from more than 220 Maricopa County voters who claimed they were harmed by printer problems on Election Day. But of those, 217 voted on Election Day, according to Maricopa County’s motion to dismiss.

“And none of those (three) voters were prevented from casting a ballot by the Defendants, but instead each chose not to vote because the declarant decided that waiting in line or visiting a different polling place was a greater inconvenience than the value they placed on voting that day,” the county wrote.

Even if those three voters had somehow been denied their right to vote, that still would leave Lake 17,114 votes short.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are out hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against what amounts to a legal temper tantrum.

You bring an utterly baseless lawsuit?  You should foot the bill.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake and Mark Finchem should face sanctions for their lawsuits