Kari Lake and Mark Finchem throw in with Mike Lindell to sue the state (read: us)

Get ready to open your wallets, Arizona. Again, that is.

The state’s dynamic duo of delusion, Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, have embarked upon yet another quest to rid Arizona of all that elections fraud they can’t seem to find. This time, by eliminating the vote counting machines they are convinced robbed Donald Trump of his second term.

Doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence that Donald Trump has been robbed of anything other than his dignity (and that, a self-imposed smash ’n grab).

Lake and Finchem on Friday sued the state of Arizona and Maricopa County, asking a federal judge to bar the use of tabulation equipment in the 2022 elections. The lawsuit is being underwritten by none other than MyPillow CEO/Trump champion Mike Lindell, who is on a nationwide quest to rid the country of the demon machines.

We've been down this lawsuit road before

Of course, any credible elections expert would tell you that machine counts are far more accurate than hand counts, but don’t let credibility get in the way of a good conspiracy chase.

Which brings us to Lindell's stooges and their Lake/Finchem “civil rights” lawsuit:

“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 wrote.

Yeah, yeah. Lather, rinse, repeat. Heavy emphasis on the lather part.

Far-right politicians – in a quest for fame and fortune and a move up the political food chain – have spent the last year and a half foaming at the mouth about the many devious ways in which Dominion Voting Systems stole the 2020 election.

About a Venezuelan (or possibly Chinese?) plot to secretly switch thousands of votes from Trump to Joe Biden. (Never mind that the post-election audit required by state law showed an exact match between a sampling of ballots counted by hand and machine.)

Remember the “Kraken” lawsuit, filed by state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward and company? That lawsuit claimed that “at least” 412,494 Arizona ballots were phony, many of them due to Dominion’s machinery that was hacked to allow “computerized ballot stuffing” of a sort that made Hugo Chavez a fan favorite in Venezuela.

It was laughed out of the court by a federal judge who noted that “gossip and innuendo” does not constitute evidence.

It's not about facts. Lake and Finchem want to win

Remember Maricopa County’s independent audit? The Republican-run county Board of Supervisors hired two sets of elections experts to try to reassure that the election was on the up and up. Those experts concluded that the tabulation equipment wasn’t manipulated or connected to the internet and thus wasn’t hacked to steal the election.

Remember the three IT experts who examined the county’s routers and Splunk logs, under the watchful eye of a special master (former GOP Rep. John Shadegg) agreed to by the Senate and Maricpa County?

All three experts separately concluded that the tabulation equipment wasn’t connected to the internet and thus wasn’t hacked to steal the election.

Remember the Senate’s own audit? It provided the most convincing evidence of all that the tabulation equipment wasn’t hacked to steal the election.

A hand count of the county’s 2.1 million paper ballots matched the machine count, showing Biden the winner. But if the machines had been hacked, wouldn’t that hand count of paper ballots be diff …

Oh, never mind.

This isn’t about logic or facts or reality.

This is about a pair of Trump-endorsed candidates hoping to ride their phony claims of election fraud right into the state’s top two jobs, governor and secretary of state.

This logic is as soft as Lindell's pillows

They’ve teamed up with Lindell, whose logic is about as soft as the pillows he hawks in his infomercials. Lindell on Saturday called the Friday filing of the lawsuit “a historical day in history – in the history of America.”

Lindell on Sunday told Business Insider that he plans to bankroll lawsuits across the nation, starting with Friday’s filing in Arizona. He estimates he’s spent $500,000 on the Arizona lawsuit, which names Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and the Maricopa and Pima County boards of supervisors.

No word on how much it’ll cost Arizona taxpayers, who already have shelled out millions of dollars as a result of this crazy conspiracy chase.

Lake’s and Finchem’s lawsuit asks a judge to block the use of machine tabulation “until the system is made open to the public and subjected to scientific analysis to determine whether it is absolutely secure from manipulation or intrusion.”

... Sigh ...

Are there any real experts left, at this point, who haven’t examined Maricopa County’s machinery?

Trump, naturally, is thrilled with the lawsuit, given that the Senate’s election audit was one big fizzle and Attorney General Mark Brnovich has thus far refused to charge elections officials with imagined crimes.

“Every state should follow the lead of the Patriots in Arizona where yesterday Kari Lake, Mark Finchem and others filed a lawsuit to ban electronic voting machines and replace them with a transparent hand count,” Trump said on Saturday, during a rally in Ohio. “Hand, hand, hand count system! Paper – paper, paper, paper! We don’t have to worry about signals being sent down from the sky!”

Or, it would seem, from anybody with the ability to think logically.

Lindell, meanwhile, told Business Insider that he plans to file lawsuits across the land, “as many as I can afford.”

And the appeal for cash will land in Republican inboxes in five ... four ... three …

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The real reason Kari Lake is suing to nix vote counting machines