Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake challenged the use of electronic voting machines and sought to ban them in the 2014 midterm elections, but a federal appeals court denied her lawsuit.
To challenge the accuracy of the vote tally machines, Lake and Republican Mark Finchem, an unsuccessful candidate for Arizona secretary of state, filed suit in April 2022.
Nearly 120,000 voters didn’t choose Finchem, while the former Phoenix news anchor, Lake, saw a decline of over 17,000.
On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the plaintiffs had not presented sufficient proof that electronic tabulation would affect their future voting behavior unfavorably. The court reasoned that using paper votes and keeping those ballots after tabulation were adequate protections under Arizona law.
Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, is home to more than 60% of Arizona voters. Due to problems with ballot printers at several voting sites, the challenge centered on the county.
Unreadable by the on-site tabulators, the ballots printed by the malfunctioning machines featured text that was either too faint or too small for the paper.
Multiple lines were affected by the confusion and delays. The Arizona Court of Appeals found no evidence to support the claim that votes cast by voters whose unreadable ballots were discarded.
This year, Lake again filed a lawsuit over Maricopa County’s method of signature verification for ballots. In Arizona’s most populated county, she is lobbying to release 1.3 million ballot envelopes with voters’ signatures.
Lake was one of the most vocal Republican candidates from last year to back the debunked claims of Trump, who ultimately lost the election.
Like many other people across the country, Lake refused to accept when he lost the election in November. There is widespread speculation that she will be Trump’s running mate in the 2024 election.
