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Judge rules no sanctions for Kari Lake in Maricopa County challenge

By Jill Ryan
Howard Fischer/Capitol Media Services
Published: Saturday, May 27, 2023 - 3:55pm
Updated: Monday, May 29, 2023 - 11:54am

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Kari Lake
Howard Fischer/Capitol Media Services
Kari Lake explains what's next on May 24, 2023, the day after a judge tossed the last remaining claim in her bid to overturn the 2022 gubernatorial election.

Kari Lake will not have to pay court-ordered penalties even though a judge rejected her latest bid to overturn the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.

In a ruling late Friday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson reaffirmed his earlier ruling that Lake failed to provide evidence of misconduct in the way Maricopa County verified the signatures on early ballots. The judge had rejected her claim that the rate of signature approval — including 274,000 at less than three seconds and 70,000 in fewer than two seconds — proved that the county was not complying with statutory requirements that signatures be compared.

Thompson also refused to grant her a new trial on her separate claim that Election Day problems with equipment at polling places was caused by intentional acts of county election workers and disenfranchised voters and affected the outcome.

But the judge, in his new ruling, said none of that entitles the county to either get its legal fees paid by Lake or to punish her or her lawyers.

Mark Finchem, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for secretary of state, and his attorneys were not so lucky.

Mark Finchem
Gage Skidmore/CC BY 2.0
Mark Finchem

In a separate order Friday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Julian ordered Finchem to pay $40,565 in legal fees and costs to Adrian Fontes, the Democrat who defeated him in the November election. And Julian imposed a separate $7,434 penalty against Daniel McCauley, his attorney, for filing a lawsuit that she previously called "groundless and not brought in good faith."

The different outcomes apparently come down to how each judge saw the claims and whether they believed there was a reasonable basis.

It starts with an Arizona law that generally requires judges to assess reasonable legal fees and expenses against an attorney or party who brings a claim "without substantial justification."

Thompson, in his ruling in the Lake case, said that means a claim is "groundless" or, to put another way, that there is no rational arguments based on evidence or law to support it.

In this case, he said, Lake failed to establish her claim that the county systematically pushed mismatched ballots through for tabulation without following the required procedures. But that, the judge said, did not make it groundless.

"Even if her argument did not prevail, Lake, through her witnesses, presented facts consistent with and in support of her legal argument," he wrote.

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