BREAKING: Maricopa County Presses Forward For Sanctions Against Kari Lake/Mark Finchem/Alan Dershowitz

The Kari Lake/Mark Finchem lawsuit seeking to require a hand count of all Arizona election results may have been dismissed last week, but Maricopa County is moving forward asking the judge to sanction the pair - and their attorneys, including Alan Dershowitz - for the "baseless and frivolous allegations" made in the case.

The dismissal states that the case was closed "in its entirety", but does not specifically mention the outstanding Motion for Sanctions previously filed. Although the County has not yet asked the Court to clarify, today's Reply (below) can be seen as a reminder to District Court Judge John Tucci.

Plaintiffs’ Response in Opposition (the “Response”) further demonstrates the frivolous nature of this suit and sanctionable conduct on the part of Plaintiffs’ counsel. The Response regurgitates the same baseless allegations in the First Amended Complaint (“FAC”), and claims factual allegations in the FAC do not have their plain meaning. Moreover, the Response itself contains numerous misrepresentations, providing further bases for an award of sanctions.

 Finchem and Lake's case was set up to require that Arizona use paper ballots in November's election and that there be a hand count of those ballots. To do that, they repeatedly claimed and insinuated that Arizona does not use paper ballots - that is not the case and Tucci's dismissal notes that it is both the law and the practice to use paper ballots.

Maricopa County based its Motion for Sanctions on those misrepresentations and attempts to hoist Finchem and Lake up on their own petard in the Reply. Noting that Plaintiffs relied heavily on a similar Georgia case, Maricopa County notes that the Georgia judge explicitly noted that Arizona is a prime example of a state using paper ballots and having the auditable trail, and that Finchem and Lake did not inform the judge of that.

This continues a very bad week for Finchem - the Republican candidate for Secretary of State. He was found responsible for $75,000 in attorneys' fees for a meritless defamation case he (and Paul Gosar and Anthony Kern) filed against Charlene Fernandez relating to January 6 involvement.

 ​This article was reported by AZ Law founder Paul Weich. Paul was running for a seat in Arizona's House of Representatives.

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