A federal judge has ordered the attorneys for failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and ex-Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem to reimburse Maricopa County for the $122,200 in taxpayers money that was wasted in their 2022 lawsuit, in which they called for the use of paper ballots over electronic voting machines in the midterm election.
Finding Lake and Finchem to have violated the law by "pursuing frivolous constitutional claims," in which they insisted that voting machines produced inaccurate results, U.S. District Court John J. Tuchi quashed their suit back in August and awarded sanctions to the county in December, per request. Now their bill has come due.
"Plaintiffs lacked an adequate factual or legal basis to support the wide ranging constitutional claims they raised or the extraordinary relief they requested," Tuchi wrote in a quote obtained from Azcentral. "Plaintiffs filled the gaps between their factual assertions, claimed injuries, and requested relief with false, misleading, and speculative allegations." To attorneys Kurt Olsen, Andrew Parker and Alan Dershowitz, he hammered down that "Attorneys must be reminded that their duties are not qualified in the way he suggests and that courts are entitled to rely on their signatures as certifications their filings are well-founded."
