A federal appeals court has dismissed a lawsuit brought by former Republican candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, who claimed that the use of “inherently unreliable” electronic tabulation machines in the Arizona’s 2022 midterm elections was a violation of their constitutional rights to vote.
In their lawsuit, originally filed last April in a U.S. District Court in Pheonix, the two candidates asked the court to keep the state from using the machines, which they allege “has created unjustified new risks of hacking, election tampering, and electronic voting fraud.”
“The vote tallies reported by electronic voting machines cannot, without objective evaluation, be trusted to accurately show which candidates actually received the most votes,” they argued in the complaint, adding that every vote should instead be counted by hand.
In August 2022, less than four months before the midterm election, District Judge John Tuchi tossed out the suit, saying that the pair lacked standing to sue, and that their claims are “vague,” “speculative” and “too conjectural to survive.”
The Obama-appointed judge further ruled that the claims that Arizona’s voting systems are flawed are essentially “state law claims masked as federal law claims,” meaning that the federal court would have to violate the 11th Amendment in order to compel Arizona’s election officials to change the way they run elections.
The August 2022 decision was upheld in an opinion handed down on Monday by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the two Republicans failed to prove that ballot-counting machines had ever been hacked in Arizona’s past elections.
“On appeal, Plaintiffs conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking, and not based on any past harm,” the judges noted.
Lack Standing as 2022 Election is Over
The circuit judges further noted that Ms. Lake, who ran for governor, and Mr. Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, were seeking to stop the state from using tabulation machines in the 2022 election. Since that particular election is over and they are no longer candidates, they “now lacked standing on that ground.”“But 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 opinion stated.
This also means it’s unnecessary for the lower court to bring up the 11th Amendment, according to the circuit judges, as the suing party failed to prove injury sufficient to satisfy Article III requirements.
Maricopa County Lawsuit
Still pending is a trial in another lawsuit that was heard by a Maricopa County Court last month. This time, Ms. Lake asked the court to grant her request to get access to images of ballot envelopes signed by approximately 1.3 million early voters in the county during last year’s election.Speaking on Tuesday in an interview with Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, Ms. Lake said she won’t give up on her election lawsuits, and called for similar legal actions in other states where election integrity has been questioned.
“I’m not giving up on the fight to bring about honest elections back to Arizona,” she said. “Frankly, we need them all over the country. And so I’m continuing along with my court cases and it’s moving slowly.”
Last week, Ms. Lake officially announced her bid to capture the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), a former Democrat. Her campaign has picked up endorsements from prominent Republicans, including Senate Republican Conference chair John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and former president Donald Trump.
“When I’m back in the White House, I need strong fighters like Kari in the Senate,” the Republican 2024 frontrunner said in a video statement played at Ms. Lake’s campaign rally. “Kari is one of the toughest fighters in our movement, and I am proud to give her my complete and total endorsement for the United States Senate.”
