Kari Lake Takes Ballot Counting Machines Case to U.S. Supreme Court
Arizona 2022 Republican candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem filed a petition for certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, appealing their lawsuit, which seeks to ban the use of electronic voting machine tabulators in the state.
Lake was the GOP nominee for governor and Finchem for secretary of state during that election cycle. Lake, currently a candidate for U.S. Senate, narrowly lost the governor’s race, while Finchem lost his contest by a wider margin.
The two filed their suit against Arizona state and county election officials in federal court in April 2022 ahead of the midterm elections, arguing that the voting machines were not reliable and should not be permitted to be used.
“Plaintiffs have a constitutional and statutory right to have their ballots, and all ballots cast together with theirs, counted accurately and transparently, so that only legal votes determine the winners of each office contested in the Midterm Election,” the complaint said.
“Electronic voting machines cannot be deemed reliably secure and do not meet the constitutional and statutory mandates to guarantee a free and fair election,” Lake and Finchem argued.
U.S. District Judge John Tuchi, who was appointed by Barack Obama, dismissed the complaint, saying their concerns were “too speculative to establish an injury in fact.”
In October 2023, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, again finding Lake and Finchem’s claims were speculative.
The three judge panel concluded, in a unanimous per curiam opinion, the suit included too many hypotheticals that would have to be proved, including demonstrating the election equipment had security failures, showing the failures were actually exploited, and proving the failures changed the election outcome. The panel was made up of an Obama, a Bill Clinton, and a Donald Trump appointee.
Lake and Finchem argued in their Thursday 210-page petition to the U.S. Supreme Court that new evidence has emerged showing the machines were not properly certified prior to the 2022 election and that the chaos involving vote tabulation machines that occurred on Election Day in Maricopa County (the Phoenix metro area) is a manifestation of it.
“Newly uncovered evidence also shows Arizona’s Maricopa County flagrantly violated state law for electronic voting systems—including using altered software not certified for use in Arizona — and actively misrepresented and concealed those violations,” the court filing said.
“Perhaps worse — although potentially unknown to Maricopa — the Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., systems used in Maricopa and almost thirty states have a built-in security breach enabling malicious actors to take control of elections, likely without detection.”
Lake and Finchem also pointed out that Maricopa County “experienced a massive disruption with its electronic voting machines” during the 2022 general election.
“Evidence from Maricopa’s tabulator system log files presented to the Arizona Senate Committee on Elections showed that on Election Day, Maricopa’s vote center tabulators rejected over 7,000 ballots every thirty minutes beginning almost immediately after the vote centers opened at 6:00 am and continuing past 8:00 pm — totaling over 217,000 rejected ballot insertions on a day when approximately 248,000 votes were cast.”
This same scene played out tens of thousands of times all across Maricopa County. How many voters were disenfranchised or simply ran out of time? If the majority of ED voters were Democrats, this would be the number 1 news story in America still today. Total joke pic.twitter.com/noY1RRQv0Q
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 14, 2022
Hours-long lines formed at voter centers throughout the county.
Here is the problem w/ what happened in Maricopa County on Election Day. This is Anthem, north of Phoenix at about 1:15 pm. Ruby red district of about 30K people. Only one polling location. Ballot tabulators not working in the morning. 2 hr wait to vote midday and still at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/CY35yQWwq5
— Randy DeSoto (@RandyDeSoto) November 14, 2022
Lake attorney Kurt Olsen further elaborated on the basis for the Supreme Court appeal on “War Room” on Real America’s Voice last week.
“We’ve uncovered three pieces of evidence. One, in 2020 and in 2022, they used altered software, and any statement that that software is certified by the [Election Assistance Commission] is false. They falsely stated that to the court. They falsely stated that the Arizona Senate during that audit in 2021, and they falsely state it on their website,” he said, referring to Maricopa County officials.
“The second thing that was false. They say they performed logic and accuracy testing, and that’s a pre-election test designed to give people confidence that the machines will actually tabulate and read votes as they are,” he added. “They did not perform logic and accuracy tests on any of the vote center tabulators they used in either the 2020 or the 2022 election. They used five spares.”
“Third … our cyber experts and our team has uncovered that the master cryptographic encryption keys that are used to govern and encrypt all election data, the files, the software, had been left open on the database in plain text,” Olsen said.
The attorney explained that a malicious actor could easily take those keys and alter election results without detection.
“This is the most basic security violation that one can have. If you talk to any cyber security professional, to leave the master cryptographic keys in plain text, available to anybody who knows where to look, that is a violation of the most basic security standards,” Olsen asserted.
On its website, Maricopa County stated that its “tabulation equipment went through extensive testing and received federally accredited Election Assistance Commission certification.”
Additionally, “Prior to each election, Maricopa County performs a statutorily required Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test.”
And, “In Arizona, hand counts are performed to verify the machine counts from a sample of ballots from each County. The Maricopa County Elections Department conducted a hand count of two-percent of the Election Day ballots and 1 percent of early ballots as required by Arizona law, and it yielded a 100-percent match to the results produced by the tabulation equipment.”
A Maricopa County spokesman said he would not comment on pending litigation, but he directed The Western Journal to its website “Just The Facts,” which stated, “Maricopa County completed the statutorily required Logic & Accuracy (L&A) tests under the observation of political party observers from each party on October 11, 2022. After passing the tests, the equipment and programs were certified for use in the election.”
Lake is separately appealing the 2022 governor’s race results at the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Disclosure: Floyd Brown, one of the owners and founder of The Western Journal, is serving on a volunteer basis as chairman of Kari Lake’s Senate campaign.
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