Kari Lake (Photo By: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa USA), Supreme Court (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images).
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court were uninterested in Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake’s far-reaching attempt to ban Dominion Voting Systems’ machines from use in Arizona elections and beyond, sending her petition to the dust bin despite the hype generated around the failed effort.
In an orders list on Monday, SCOTUS jettisoned the case without comment — leaving the Ninth Circuit’s affirmation of the dismissal in the case undisturbed even though Lake insisted this was an urgent matter supported by persuasive “new evidence.”
The local news actor turned failed gubernatorial candidate and alleged defamer filed her petition in mid-March and then sought to expedite the case days later, claiming that she and fellow Arizona Republican Mark Finchem needed a ruling from the Supreme Court “as far in advance of the 2024 election at possible.” Lake has gotten an answer far in advance of the election, just not the one she wanted.
In the now tossed petition, Lake asserted that Dominion’s machines made “hanging chads […] seem like a blessing,” claiming the current electoral landscape is more of a hellscape than it was during the Florida recount of 2000.
“At least there, humans could see and touch ballots and punch cards. By turning elections over to black boxes running software outside the public domain, we surrendered the ability to meaningfully verify the election process,” she said.
In her ensuing motion to expedite, Lake claimed to have evidence that Dominion’s equipment “violates basic cyber security standards by leaving master cryptographic encryption keys on the machines in plain text” and that Maricopa County “used illegally altered election software in the 2020 and 2022 elections and falsely represented that this software is certified by Election Assistance Commission.”
After the filings hit the docket, a Dominion spokesperson rejected Lake’s cybersecurity claim, telling Law&Crime it was “implausible and conspiratorial.” The spokesperson added that the company’s machines “are fully certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and elections are secured by many layers of robust operational and procedural safeguards, including auditable paper ballots, that are overseen by local election officials.”
The ill-fated Lake lawsuit was previously tossed for lacking standing, and her attempt to use her current candidacy for federal office couple with purported “extraordinary” evidence didn’t help revive her cause.
Notably, U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi doled out sanctions against the lawyers who brought the case for making “false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” back in late 2022.
The judge concluded that plaintiffs lacked standing to sue because the claims about “insecure or inaccurate voting systems” were “too speculative to establish an injury in fact.”
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