A federal judge is attempting to deter “baseless” lawsuits about election fraud by sanctioning Arizona’s Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Secretary of State Mark Finchem’s attorneys.
In a scathing 30-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi ordered sanctions against Lake’s and Finchem’s attorneys.
The two Trump-endorsed candidates had filed suit against Pima County and Maricopa County in April in an attempt to prevent the Counties from using electronic voting machines to tally the ballot or to cast votes.
The pair approached the courts to request that Arizona’s most populous counties use paper ballots and hand count those ballots during the midterms.
In August, the suit was dismissed, with Tuchi describing the lawsuit as containing “conjectural allegations of potential injuries.”
Before Tuchi’s dismissal, the defendants — five of Maricopa County’s primarily-Republican election board — requested that the attorneys who filed the suit be sanctioned because of the “numerous false allegations about Arizona elections” contained in the complaint.
On Thursday, Tuchi granted those sanctions.
He described Lake’s and Finchem’s lawsuit as “frivolous,” noting that the pair sought “perhaps unprecedented” intervention in Arizona’s election system while not providing “a factual basis or legal theory” to satisfy the massive burden.
Tuchi added in the 30-page opinion that he wouldn’t “condone” the “furthering [of] false narratives” that erode the trust in the democratic election system, especially during this “time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process.”
Tuchi also noted that in recent years there had been far too many attorneys weaponizing the judicial system for “political purposes,” an action he strongly condemned and wanted to deter by holding the attorneys involved “accountable.”
