U.S. Supreme Court won’t take up Kari Lake’s bid to ban ballot counting machines

The U.S. Supreme Court has shot down Kari Lake’s request to take up her ballot tabulator case that aimed to stop the use of the machines to count millions of Arizona ballots. 

The highest court in the nation did not provide any comment on Monday when it denied the U.S. Senate hopeful’s petition to overturn the lower court’s decision to throw out her case. 

Lake and fellow Republican Mark Finchem initially filed the suit in April 2022, while she was running for Arizona governor and he was running for secretary of state. They alleged that the electronic ballot tabulators used in Maricopa and Pima counties were “hackable” and that the courts should place an injunction on their use ahead of the November 2022 election, and instead force elections officials to count all the ballots by hand. 

In August 2022, U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi threw out the lawsuit and issued a scathing ruling. He later ordered $122,000 in sanctions against the attorneys in the case, saying that Lake and Finchem’s claims amounted to mere “conjectural allegations of potential injuries.”

In October 2023, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with Tuchi’s decision to reject the case, agreeing that it was “frivolous.”  

“None of 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 appellate court wrote. 

Finchem and Lake, who both lost their 2022 bids for statewide office to Democrats, each filed lawsuits after that election seeking to overturn the results. In both cases, judges found that neither candidate could prove that there was any fraud, malfeasance or maladministration that changed the outcome. 

In their petition to the Supreme Court, Lake and Finchem go as far as to accuse Arizona election officials of illegally altering the tabulator software — a crime under Arizona law — and concealing those alterations from the court when the case was originally filed. 

They also claimed that Dominion Voting Systems equipment used in Maricopa County, and in many other counties across the country, “have a built-in security breach enabling malicious actors to take control of elections, likely without detection.”

Dominion and its software have been the target of right-wing election conspiracy theories for years now, and last spring Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787 million over false claims it made about the company’s voting equipment. 

And then on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a final blow to the case, by declining to hear it. 

The Arizona Republican Party — alongside the Georgia Republican Party and the Republican State Committee of Delaware — backed up Lake in her petition to SCOTUS, filing their own supporting brief earlier this month urging the court to take up the case. 

The Virginia attorney representing the Republican parties, William J.Olson argued that, since 2020, state and federal courts across the U.S. began using what he called “unreasonable standards” to determine whether election cases have legal standing to move forward.

“The decision of the district court of Arizona to dismiss Petitioners’ challenge to the conduct of the 2022 Arizona election is one of the clearest illustrations of this abusive line of cases which have required much more than well-pled allegations, brought by candidates, that elections were being conducted in violation of law,” Olson wrote. 

Neither the Lake campaign nor the Arizona GOP immediately responded to requests for comment on the Supreme Court denial. 

John J. Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, previously told the Arizona Mirror that he did not expect the high court to hear the case. 

“I find it highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will grant this writ of certiorari and take up the case,” Martin wrote in an email. “To do so, four justices would need to vote in favor of granting it. I doubt that there are four justices eager to entertain what can best be described as speculative and conspiratorial allegations brought by Lake and Finchem.”