The Supreme Court has been cautious about taking on voter fraud cases lost in the lower courts.
That discretion continued this week, with the court denying Kari Lake her day in court.
Talking Points…
- Kari Lake claims about voting machines
- Supreme Court denial
- Analysis
There was a time when Kari Lake was not a Trump fan, but she reversed her ways when she decided to run for governor in Arizona. Lake was facing off against Katie Hobbs, a controversial Democrat with a lot of skeletons in her closet. This would be a huge test of Trump’s endorsement power and MAGA influence during the 2022 cycle.
This race turned out to be almost identical to the 2020 election, with Lake regurgitating Trump talking points on the campaign trail and Hobbs hiding in her basement, refusing to debate because of several controversies surrounding her at the time. Once again, the basement strategy worked, with Hobbs narrowly defeating Lake by 0.6%, or about 17,000 votes.
Like Trump, it appeared that Lake would win on election day, but early and absentee voting flipped the script, with Hobbs being announced as the winner. It took no time at all for Lake to take another page out of Trump’s playbook by claiming a problem with voting machines cost her the election.
And like Trump, Lake failed at every possible level to win a case claiming there was some election fraud that cost her the election. When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals tossed her case, the ruling stated that her claim did not show:
“A plausible inference that their individual votes in future elections will be adversely affected by the use of electronic tabulation, particularly given the robust safeguards in Arizona law, the use of paper ballots, and the post-tabulation retention of those ballots.”
Lake’s last hope on this front was to have the Supreme Court take the case. However, as we noted above, the court has avoided these cases like the plague. So, it was no surprise that the court declined to hear Lake’s case with Mark Finchem, who lost his election for Secretary of State, had been declined. The duo had claimed:
“Arizona-certified optical scanners and ballot marking devices, as well as the software on which they rely, have been wrongly certified for use.”
They further claimed that Arizona’s voting machines had been “hacked” and “manipulated.”
After the Supreme Court denied their application to have the case reviewed, Kurt Olsen, one of the attorneys in the suit, stated:
“We are obviously disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to review the decisions of the Arizona district court and the Ninth Circuit, and order that our challenge to the 2022 election procedures be heard on the merits.”
Olsen still believes this case has merits, stating that the courts have only denied his case based on standing, not the “merits of the case,” therefore, they are going to continue to raise these issues until they are heard out. The bottom line here is that they will never win this case, period, as the courts will not take a case unless they see absolute proof of manipulation, which does not appear to be present here. But I can guarantee that if Lake loses her Senate election in 2024, these claims will be revisited, as claiming election fraud is the new “in” thing to do on both sides of the aisle when a high-profile and controversial candidate loses an election.
