Kari Lake hasn’t given up the election conspiracy theories.
The Arizona MAGA darling is asking the Supreme Court to revive a lawsuit that seeks to ban electronic voting machines. That lawsuit was filed during Lake’s failed 2022 gubernatorial bid.
Now she’s the front-runner in the GOP primary for Arizona’s Senate race, and she’s once again stoking doubt about election security and looking to block electronic voting machines from being used. (Electronic voting machines have been used for years across the country; banning them would unleash chaos on elections.)
Lake, a former local TV news anchor, rose to prominence as a 2020 election denier who embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. She has been a frequent litigant attacking Arizona’s elections in court and continues to carry that mantle, even as she has mode overtures to the party’s establishment — and “McCain Republicans” she famously dismissed — during her Senate run.
Lake and Mark Finchem, a fellow election conspiracy theorist who lost the Arizona secretary of state race in the midterms, filed a lawsuit in 2022 that claimed that electronic voting machines were untrustworthy and argued they shouldn’t be used in Arizona. The suit echoed much of Trump’s misinformation about the security of American elections. Trump narrowly lost the state in 2020, and it was one of the focal points of his and his allies’ efforts to try to overturn the results.
The case went disastrously for Lake. It was dismissed in federal court for a lack of standing. Her attorneys were also sanctioned, with a judge writing at the time that he would “not condone litigants … furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process.”
A federal appellate court upheld that dismissal, writing that there are “robust safeguards in Arizona law, the use of paper ballots, and the post-tabulation retention of those ballots” to guard the state’s election system.
Now, Lake is asking the nation’s top court to revive her case, claiming that new evidence will vindicate her. “By turning elections over to black boxes running software outside the public domain, we surrendered the ability to meaningfully verify the election process,” her attorneys write in a filing Thursday.
Lake’s plea to the high court was made on Thursday, according to the petition posted by AZ Law, a website covering the legal landscape in the state. It has yet to be formally docketed by the Supreme Court.
The case also shows that Lake and her allies are laying the groundwork to question the upcoming elections if their legal hail mary is unsuccessful.
“The weakness in voting infrastructure requires resolution before the 2024 election,” her attorneys wrote. “Without resolution, election results in the numerous states with Dominion voting machines — at the very least — cannot be trusted.”
