Arizona Supreme Court Rules On Kari Lake’s Election Lawsuit
The Arizona Supreme Court has rejected Republican Kari Lake’s request to have the state’s highest court hear her election challenge. A court of appeals has already planned to hear the case.
As she runs for the Senate in the United States, she is known for her support of former President Donald Trump. Lake’s initial challenge centered on issues with ballot printers, but the judge ruled that she lacked sufficient evidence of malicious intent. She claims in her most recent case that the signature verification procedure was severely flawed.
The three-judge panel noted in their 11-page opinion that Lake and Finchem “conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking and not based on any past harm.”
“Even assuming Plaintiffs could continue to claim standing as prospective voters in future elections, they had not alleged a particularized injury and therefore failed to establish the kind of injury Article III requires,” the ruling said.
“None of the plaintiffs’ allegations supported 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,” the panel added.
Finchem lost his race by more than 122,000 votes. Judge Melissa Iyer Julian of Maricopa County Superior Court penalized him in March after charging him with bringing a “groundless” case to her court.
“None of Contestant Finchem’s allegations, even if true, would have changed the vote count enough to overcome the 120,000 votes he needed to affect the result of this election,” she wrote. “The Court finds that this lawsuit was groundless and not brought in good faith.”
Also, Lake was sanctioned in May for making “false factual statements” in court regarding her loss to Democratic rival Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race. The court ordered her legal team to pay $2,000 after assessing that she falsely claimed that 35,000 ballots in Maricopa County, where there are around 60 percent of the state’s registered voters, were improperly added to the total vote count.
“Joe Biden’s policies have crushed Arizona. Arizonans are dealing with record inflation, up 20 percent under the Biden administration. Arizona is also on the front lines of the worst illegal immigration crisis in American history. Nearly 8 million illegal immigrants are under Biden, equal to the population of Arizona,” Barrasso said in a statement, per Fox News. “The U.S. Senate needs a Senator from Arizona who understands these issues and will fight hard to solve them.”
In a statement to the outlet, Lake said she was “honored by the friendship and endorsement.”
“[Barrasso] is a tested and proven conservative leader who I greatly admire. I look forward to working with Senator Barrasso to get America back on track and fire Chuck Schumer,” she noted further.
Ahead of her endorsement, Lake spent time meeting with various senators on Capitol Hill, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and hardly mentioned election fraud in her announcement speech despite it being central to her political persona following her loss in the Arizona gubernatorial election last year.
