The United States Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a lawsuit by former Arizona Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and former Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem to ban the use of hackable electronic voting machines.
Kari Lake is the Trump-Endorsed US Senate Candidate in Arizona and is on course to face Democrat Ruben Gallego in November.
The appeal by Lake and Finchem comes after the stolen 2022 election, where 60% of the voting machines were reportedly programmed to fail on election day, causing mass voter disenfranchisement and up to four-hour-long lines for Republican in-person voters. Kari Lake ran for governor and allegedly lost the race by less than one percent after this debacle, despite leading by double digits in polls leading up to election day.
The filing includes “new allegations,” some of which were previously mentioned in Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn the stolen election, including:
- First, Maricopa did not conduct the required L&A testing, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
- Second, Maricopa did not use certified software, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
- Third, Maricopa used software that made all passwords needed to control Maricopa elections available to anyone with physical or remote access, which supports petitioners’ allegations and evidence that past elections were manipulated.
- Fourth, altering election software without the Arizona Secretary of State’s approval is criminal act under Arizona law, A.R.S. §§16-449(A), 16- 452(C), 16-1009, 16-1004(B), 16-1010, thereby evaporating presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).
- Fifth, Maricopa’s officials misrepresented their compliance with Arizona election law (e.g., L&A testing, certified software), which negates any presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).
- Sixth, Maricopa officials abdicated control over the complex election systems to embedded private Dominion employees who lack any presumption of regularity under Arizona law. See note 4, infra.
Later, on April 2nd, Lake/Finchem attorney Kurt Olsen filed another brief to the Supreme Court after respondent Adrian Fontes failed to file a necessary brief in opposition. Fontes decided to waive any response to the brief as well as the Motion to Expedite.
As Brian Lupo of The Gateway Pundit reported, the new allegations included failure by Maricopa County officials to conduct the mandated Logic and Accuracy testing, failure to only use certified software on Arizona’s voting machines, and critical encryption keys stored in plain-text that were found in accessible databases during the Arizona audit
Coincidentally, similar critical encryption keys were found in plain-text in open records requests in Georgia and New Mexico and identified in the Antrim County forensic image report in 2021 as part of Bailey v. Antrim Co.
In October 2023, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case, claiming that Lake and Finchem did not have standing and “failed to establish that a future injury was either imminent or substantially likely to occur.”
The Supreme Court dismissed the case without comment. According to the SCOTUS webpage, “The vast majority of cases filed in the Supreme Court are disposed of summarily by unsigned orders. Such an order will, for example, deny a petition for certiorari without comment.”
Lake and Finchem’s attorney Kurt Olsen gave the following statement to The Gateway Pundit:
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. Although the Supreme Court grants review in less than 1 percent of cases presented on petition, we believe we presented a case that called out to be reviewed, if the American People are to regain confidence in elections.
What made our case unusual was that it was after the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal that we learned that the Arizona defendants falsely represented to the lower courts that Maricopa County complied with state law in several respects. Contrary to their representations to the lower courts, Maricopa County did not use software certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (“EAC”), and that Maricopa County failed to conduct pre-election “logic and accuracy” testing on all its 400-plus vote center tabulators in accordance with Arizona law. In fact, Maricopa County has been using and continues to use software that has been secretly altered with respect to how ballots are read and tabulated. Since Maricopa County contains 62 percent of Arizona voters, what happens there dominates state-wide elections.
In addition, evidence has come to light showing that, in the 2020 election, Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., left the master cryptographic encryption keys unprotected on the election databases and in plain text on its systems used in at least five states — including Arizona. Doing so violated basic cyber security practices, Federal Information Processing Standards (“FIPS”), and EAC certification. With these cryptographic keys, anyone with access to these systems can manipulate election results without detection once they bypass the basic Windows log-in (easily done in less than five minutes with instructions available on the internet). Arizona election officials have yet to respond in court to these recent discoveries, continually trying to avoid any review of their actions.
The American people deserve facts, transparency, and truth in how elections are conducted in this Country. The Kari Lake and Mark Finchem case was dismissed based on a purported lack of standing to assert an injury. 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.
Per Kyle Becker on X:
BREAKING. The Supreme Court has DISMISSED the Arizona Election Integrity Case without comment.
The plaintiffs @KariLakeand Mark Finchem has brought forth expert testimony to indicate that there were serious voting machine vulnerabilities, including the “placing of the master cryptographic keys on the election database in plain text and unprotected allows any actor with access to the voting system complete control over the election results.”
There was a “god key” detected in the voting machine code.
“Dominion placed the master cryptographic keys in plain text and unprotected on the election database except for Windows-login, which are easily bypassed. Leaving these highly sensitive cryptographic keys in this state violates all cyber security protocols and allows a malicious actor to take control of the machine and change results without detection,” remarked Patrick Byrne.
In addition, due to the process of “reconciliation” of the Arizona votes, it was “not possible to know the true outcome of voting at 43 voting centers” because the voting center results were not recorded locally on memory cards.
In April 2022, prior to the midterm elections, the two plaintiffs initiated legal proceedings against Arizona state and county election officials in federal court alleging that the voting machines lacked reliability and thus should not be authorized for use.
“Plaintiffs have a constitutional and statutory right to have their ballots, and all ballots cast together with theirs, counted accurately and transparently, so that only legal votes determine the winners of each office contested in the Midterm Election,” the complaint said.
“Electronic voting machines cannot be deemed reliably secure and do not meet the constitutional and statutory mandates to guarantee a free and fair election.”
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.