On Monday, the United States Supreme Court became the latest and final court to dismiss a voting machine lawsuit brought by Arizona Republicans Kari Lake and Mark Finchem.
Their lawsuit to ban electronic voting machines in Arizona was filed before the 2022 midterms, which saw Lake and Finchem both lose their elections.
As The Hill reports:
Lawyers for Lake, who is running for a Senate seat in Arizona this cycle, and Finchem, who is seeking a state Senate seat, argued in a court filing to the Supreme Court that they had sufficiently argued that all “Arizona-certified optical scanners and ballot marking devices, as well as the software on which they rely, have been wrongly certified for use”; Arizona's voting machines had been “hacked” and “manipulated”; and that there were apparent discrepancies in the Maricopa County's vote count after the 2020 election.
Two lower courts ruled that neither Lake nor Finchmen suffered harm giving them legal cause to sue.
Their lawsuit had been rejected by a federal judge in 2022, and that dismissal was affirmed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
The 9th Circuit's decision called the nature of the claim “not clear,” stating the lawsuit rested on speculative concerns from “purported experts on manipulation risk.”
The court continued, noting that the plaintiffs did “not contend that any electronic tabulation machine in Arizona has ever been hacked.”
“On appeal, Plaintiffs conceded that their arguments were limited to potential future hacking, and not based on any past harm,” the 9th Circuit wrote.
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