Kari Lake's lawsuit was 'explosive,' all right. It blew up smack in her face

Remember last month when Kari Lake and Mark Finchem claimed they had “new evidence” meriting a “do-over” of the 2022 election?

“This new evidence is the most explosive evidence ever!” their benefactor Mike Lindell promised on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

“It’s going to shock the world,” he told Bannon a few days later, adding that people should buy his percale sheets to pass out to their friends along with Lake’s Supreme Court appeal.

Ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a major funder of the Arizona Senate’s 2020 audit, also promoted the supposed big reveal, declaring "This moment could redefine history."

Today, history marches on, its definition intact.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Lake and Finchem’s appeal.

A long 2 years of trying to sell lies to the courts

It’s the end of the road for their two-year quest to outlaw those demon Dominion vote counting machines — on account of maybe, possibly they might someday, theoretically be hacked.

Only don’t expect Lake and Finchem to drop their rant or, heaven forbid, come clean with Arizona’s voters.

True to brand, Lake suggested the Supreme Court was either naive or in on the vast conspiracy to steal our vote.

“The Supreme Court of the United States did not believe that the issue of election integrity was worth the court's time during another crucial presidential race," she said on X, formerly Twitter.

That should keep the MAGA crowd riled.

Lake, Finchem and their fellow far-right pals, in a quest for money or a rung up the political food chain, have spent the last three years regaling us with conspiracy theories about the many devious ways the 2020 election was stolen in Arizona. Many of them involved the Dominion Voting System’s tabulation machines used to count the vote in Maricopa County.

Remember the “Kraken” lawsuit, filed by then-state GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward — the one claiming “at least” 412,494 Arizona ballots were phony, part of a Venezuelan-style plot to secretly switch thousands of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden?

A federal judge dismissed it, noting that “gossip and innuendo” does not constitute evidence.

Even MAGA's own audit couldn't find evidence of fraud

Remember Maricopa County’s independent audit”?

Two sets of elections experts concluded the tabulation equipment wasn’t connected to the internet, much less hacked to switch votes.

Remember the three IT experts who examined the county’s routers and logs, under the watchful eye of a special master (former GOP Rep. John Shadegg), agreed to by the Arizona Senate and Maricopa County.

All three separately concluded the equipment wasn’t hacked.

How about the Arizona Senate’s famed Cyber Ninja audit, the one funded and run by Trump supporters determined to blow the lid off the the conspiracy to steal our vote?

No hacking found there either. In fact, a hand count of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million paper ballots matched the machine count, showing Biden the winner.

But why stop casting doubts about election reliability

So naturally Lake and Finchem, then candidates for governor and secretary of state, sued the state of Arizona and Maricopa County in April 2022, asking a judge to bar the machine tabulation of votes in the 2022 election.

In their lawsuit, underwritten by Lindell, they claimed that even if the machines weren't hacked, they could be hacked and that there's no way to verify the machine count unless we start voting with paper ballots.

Ignoring the fact that we already vote with paper ballots.

U.S. District Court John J. Tuchi threw out their "frivilous" lawsuit in August 2022 and slapped their lawyers with both sanctions and the county’s legal tab.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously rejected their complaint, noting it “relies on a ‘long chain of hypothetical contingencies’ that have never occurred in Arizona.”

In other words, a conspiracy must be more than a figment of your imagination — or a calculated political strategy — if you want the courts to take you seriously.

Is it any surprise the US Supreme Court send 'em packing?

Now, the Supreme Court has sent them packing, appropriately unimpressed.

That’s because the pair’s new evidence sounded pretty much like the same old Maricopa County-is-the-devil argument they’ve been making all along: altered software, faulty testing, cover-ups, the usual stuff the courts have rejected.

And still no evidence that Dominion’s machines — the ones various independent experts have confirmed were not connected to the internet — were hacked.

Yet Lake and Finchem had the nerve in March to request “do-over relief” from the 2022 election and an end to the machine tabulation of votes in America.

Please give us all a break from the toxic spew

You know who really deserves “relief”?

The voters of Arizona and America. For three years, we’ve been force fed the lie that we can’t trust our elections. Decent people put their faith in shysters and now a fair swath of America has no faith in the bedrock that underlies the foundation of our country: Our elections.

Meanwhile, Lake and Finchem have moved on, of a sort. They're now hoping to hoodwink us into electing them to the U.S. Senate and state Senate respectively, on a promise to restore "election integrity."

Put another way, to "restore" what they stole.

In the end, Lindell was right after all.

Lake’s and Finchem’s new “evidence” was, indeed, explosive.

It blew up smack in their faces.

Now, what are they going to take to undo the damage?

Reach Roberts at [email protected]. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at laurierobertsaz.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake's 'explosive' lawsuit just blew up in her face