Supreme Court denies request from Arizona candidates seeking to ban electronic vote tabulators

PHOENIX (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a request from Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake to prohibit the use of electronic vote counting machines in Arizona.

Lake and former Republican candidate for secretary of state Mark Finchem filed a lawsuit two years ago, repeating unsubstantiated claims about the security of vote-counting machines. They relied in part on the testimony of Donald Trump supporters who led a discredited review of the election in Maricopa County, including Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber ​​Ninjas, who oversaw the effort described by supporters 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 sanctioned 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 have made baseless allegations of voter fraud the centerpiece of their campaigns. Both lost to Democrats and challenged the results in court.

Lake is now the GOP front-runner for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, where she has at times tried to reach out to establishment Republicans turned off by her focus on making allegations of fraud about past elections. Finchem is running for state Senate.

Lawyers for Lake and Finchem argued that manual counting is the most efficient method for totaling election results. Election administrators testified that manually counting dozens of races out of millions of votes would require an extraordinary amount of time, space and labor, and would be less accurate.

The Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the vote count case marks the end of the road for the effort to require a manual vote count. Neither judge dissented when the court denied his request.

Meanwhile, Lake refused to defend herself in a defamation lawsuit against her filed by a top Maricopa County election official. She accused county recorder Stephen Richer, a fellow Republican, of rigging the 2022 gubernatorial election against her.