Republican candidate Kari Lake says she will run for the Arizona U.S. Senate seat during a rally in Scottsdale, Ariz. on Oct. 10, 2023.
Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake is seeking to revive a lawsuit in the U.S. Supreme Court that aims to eliminate the use of electronic voting machines in the United States.
The lawsuit, originally filed when Lake was a candidate for governor of Arizona, was dismissed in August 2022. The district court judge overseeing the matter later sanctioned the plaintiffs for making false and unsupported claims in their filings. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed the dismissal in October 2023.
The appeal to the nine justices begins with concerns that computerized voting might threaten democracy.
The petition for writ of certiorari mentions the public's increasing lack of trust in elections and criticizes electronic voting machines. The original lawsuit was dismissed because Lake and Mark Finchem did not have sufficient grounds to sue. In their appeal to the Supreme Court, Lake and Finchem claim that new evidence about the safeguards used to ensure vote accuracy has emerged.
The original lawsuit was dismissed because the judge found that Lake and Mark Finchem did not have enough evidence to prove they were harmed.
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, Lake and Finchem argue that new evidence has been revealed regarding the safeguards used to ensure the accuracy of the vote.
The petition alleges that Maricopa County violated state law for electronic voting systems and used altered software that was not certified for use in Arizona.
Attorney Lawrence Joseph claims that the state previously made false representations to get the original lawsuit dismissed.
The petition argues that Maricopa County's election software was altered without authorization, making the election results unreliable.
The petition argues that the new evidence provides more direct proof of the legal harms claimed by the plaintiffs.
The petition argues that when the case was filed, there was no doubt that the respondents had directly injured the petitioners, and a court could have stopped those injuries with injunctive relief. The only question now is whether the petitioners' injuries have become impossible to fix. Even after elections have been held, their injuries could still be partially fixed by an injunction for future elections.
Lake's petition points out a well-known voting machine company as especially likely to have their systems misused and presents their request as a sort of ticking time bomb for elections.
The petition reads that without a solution, election results in the many states with Dominion voting machines, at the very least, cannot be trusted. Without this Court's focused effort, the technical ability to thwart the will of the voters will go undetected and without meaningful review due to the short timeframes of election litigation and the complexity and long duration of civil litigation.