Supreme Court denies request by Arizona candidates seeking to ban electronic vote tabulators
PHOENIX — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider a request from Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake to ban the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona.
Lake and former Republican Secretary of State Mark Finchem filed suit two years ago, repeating baseless allegations about the security of vote-counting machines. They relied in part on testimony from Donald Trump supporters who led a discredited review of the Maricopa County election, including Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, who oversaw the effort that supporters described as a ‘forensic audit’.
U.S. District Judge John Tuchi in Phoenix ruled that Lake and Finchem lacked standing to sue because they failed to demonstrate any realistic likelihood of harm. He later chastised their lawyers for filing a claim based on frivolous information.
When the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, Lake was running for governor and Finchem was running for secretary of state. They made baseless election fraud claims a centerpiece of their campaigns. Both subsequently lost to Democrats and challenged the outcomes in court.
Lake is now the Republican Party’s frontrunner for U.S. Senate in Arizona, where she has at times tried to reach out to establishment Republicans who have been turned off by her focus on making fraud claims about past elections. Finchem is a candidate for the Senate.
Attorneys for Lake and Finchem had argued that hand counts are the most efficient method for tallying election results. Election administrators stated that counting dozens of races on millions of ballots by hand would take an extraordinary amount of time, space and manpower, and would be less accurate.
The Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the vote-counting case marks the end of the effort to require a manual counting of ballots. Not a single judge disagreed when the court denied their request.
Meanwhile, Lake declined to defend herself in a defamation lawsuit against her by a top Maricopa County election official. She had accused County Recorder Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican, of rigging the 2022 gubernatorial election against her.