Supreme Court declines to hear Kari Lake, Mark Finchem's electronic voting machine case

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a federal lawsuit from 2022 regarding electronic voting machines that Arizona GOP U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake and former Arizona GOP secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem had brought.

The Supreme Court denied Lake and Finchem’s writ of certiorari that was filed last month, along with numerous other cases on Monday, indicating the court would not hear them.

In April 2022, before the midterm elections, Lake and Finchem filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court, arguing that electronic machines in certain Arizona counties are in violation of constitutional rights and had been wrongly certified for use.

A federal judge rejected the lawsuit in August 2022, per AZ Central, but Lake and Finchem appealed it to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year. The appellate court upheld the district court’s dismissal last October, The Hill reported.

Both Lake and Finchem ran and lost in the 2022 midterm elections, as the Arizona GOP gubernatorial and secretary of state nominees, respectively.

Kurt Olsen, one of the attorneys on the case, said regarding the Supreme Court's denial that "[w]e 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 argued that new information had surfaced after the lawsuit was dismissed by the circuit court.

"Although the Supreme Court grants review in less than 1 percent of cases presented on petition, we believe we presented a case," he added, according to The Hill.

"The Kari Lake and Mark Finchem case was dismissed based on a purported lack of standing to assert an injury," Olsen said. "Therefore, the courts, even now, have not ruled on the merits of our case. We will continue to raise these issues especially in light of the upcoming 2024 election."

The state Republican parties of Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Nebraska, and New Mexico, along with 11 county Republican committees, filed amici curiae briefs in support of Lake and Finchem’s lawsuit.