Supreme Court rejects Kari Lake’s voting machine lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake to prohibit the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona.

Lake and Republican former secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem filed a lawsuit two years ago, alleging that the vote-counting machines were susceptible to hacking and manipulation.

U.S. District Judge John Tuchi in Phoenix ruled that Lake and Finchem did not have the standing to sue as they did not demonstrate a realistic risk of harm. He also sanctioned their lawyers for bringing a claim based on unsubstantiated information.

When the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, Lake was a gubernatorial candidate and Finchem was running for secretary of state. They both heavily focused on baseless election fraud claims during their campaigns. Despite this, they both lost to Democrats and challenged the results in court.

Lake is currently the leading Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, while Finchem is running for state Senate.

Lawyers for Lake and Finchem argued that hand counting is the most effective method for tallying election results. However, election officials stated that manually counting numerous races on millions of ballots would require a significant amount of time, space, and manpower, and would be less accurate.

The Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the vote-counting case signals the end of the road for the push for hand counting of ballots. There were no dissenting opinions when the court declined their request.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.