Former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has been dismissed from her lawsuit alleging that Arizona’s use of electronic tabulation systems violated the federal Constitution. The 9th Circuit judges dismissed the lawsuit, filed in April, which she brought alongside former Arizona Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem. Lake claimed that electronic voting tabulations in the state’s 2022 midterm election could not be trusted with accurate results. The dismissal comes after Lake faced several legal setbacks following her loss last year in Arizona’s governor race to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
Lake claimed that the election was stolen from her due to a rigged system of faulty machines and potentially forged or invalid signatures on envelopes containing submitted absentee ballots. The judges came to the conclusion that none of the plaintiffs’ claims supported a reasonable conclusion that the use of electronic tabulation would hurt their ability to vote in future elections. This was especially true since Arizona law provides strong protections, paper ballots are used, and those ballots are kept after the election.
Lake has continued to fight against her election loss, filing numerous lawsuits against voting systems and previously claimed that she was entitled to an order vacating Maricopa County’s canvass and Arizona’s certification of the results of the 2022 election. Despite her recent legal woes, Lake announced this month that she was planning to run for the U.S. Senate. If she wins the nomination, she will likely face off against Representative Ruben Gallego, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, and independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has not said whether she will run.
