Kari Lake and Mark Finchem lose yet another election lawsuit

To the surprise of absolutely no one, Kari Lake and Mark Finchem have lost yet again in their self-serving quest to force Arizona to move to an expensive, time consuming and unreliable hand count of ballots in next year’s election.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Monday swiftly and unanimously sent this not-so-dynamic duo packing, as they continue to claim that vote counting machines are the handmaiden of the devil.

“Their operative complaint relies on a ‘long chain of hypothetical contingencies’ that have never occurred in Arizona,” the three-judge panel ruled, in an opinion first reported by AZ Law blog.

In other words, a conspiracy must be more than a figment of your imagination — or a calculated political strategy — if you want the courts to take you seriously.

Lake, Finchem came with no evidence

Lake and Finchem, with financial backing from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, sued the state in April 2022 while they were running for governor and secretary of state.

They asked a judge to bar the machine tabulation of votes in the 2022 election, claiming that Dominion Voting Systems machines produced inaccurate results in 2020 and that there were no paper ballots to verify the machine count.

“Plaintiffs have a constitutional and statutory right to have their ballots, and all ballots cast together with theirs, counted accurately and transparently, so that only legal votes determine the winners of each office contested in the Midterm Election,” they huffed.

Never mind that they had no evidence to show that the ballots were counted inaccurately or non-transparently.

Never mind that Arizona already uses paper ballots.

Never mind, even, that state law already requires the hand count of a random sample of those ballots, to verify the machine count is accurate.

Their claim: Machines could be hacked

It’s astonishing that any candidate who wants to be taken seriously — people who actually hope to be elected to positions of authority — would bring such a sloppy lawsuit.

But then, this case was never a serious attempt to remedy a real problem. It was a political stunt, running to court in the middle of a campaign to feed the lie that Arizona’s vote was stolen.

To his credit, U.S. District Court Judge John J. Tuchi called them on it, throwing out their case in August 2022 and later hitting their attorneys with $122,000 in sanctions for bringing a “frivolous” lawsuit that “baselessly kicked up a cloud of dust.”

How does a Trump endorsement: Help Kari Lake win?

In their appeal last month, Lake’s and Finchem’s attorney conceded they had no evidence but still they argued that the 2024 election — one in which both candidates will be on the ballot again — still should be counted by hand.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Heavy emphasis on the lather part and please disregard the fact that any credible expert will tell you that a machine count is far more accurate than any hand tabulation of votes.

The question, Lake and Finchem now claim, is not whether the machines were hacked in 2020 or 2022 but whether they could potentially be hacked.

County, state should ask for further sanctions

Fortunately, the judges weren’t ready take a ride on that particular flight of fancy.

“In the end, none of Plaintiffs’ allegations support a plausible inference that their individual votes in future elections will be adversely affected by the use of electronic tabulation, particularly given the robust safeguards in Arizona law, the use of paper ballots, and the post-tabulation retention of those ballots,” they wrote.

In the end, this should be the final death throes of the so-called Kraken conspiracy, but I wouldn’t bet on that.

There is, after all, fundraising to be done and voters’ confidence to be undermined in an election process that for decades worked just fine ... until Donald Trump lost an election.

The county and state should ask for further sanctions in this case, to cover our cost of constantly defending against this nonsense.

And this time, it shouldn’t be the attorneys who have to pay the price.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake and Mark Finchem lose yet another election lawsuit