Mike Lindell's and Kari Lake's 'explosive' new evidence of election skullduggery goes pfft

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem continue their quest to outlaw Arizona’s vote counting machines, telling the U.S. Supreme Court they have “new evidence” that merits a “do-over” of the 2022 election.

All week long, My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is underwriting their lawsuit, has been touting “the most explosive evidence ever!”

“It’s going to be the biggest thing ever, and we are going to save this country!" he said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast over the weekend.

By Thursday, he’d upgraded his promise to one of global import.

“It’s going to shock the world,” he told Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, adding that people should buy his percale sheets to pass out to their friends along with the Supreme Court appeal. (“Get ‘em for everybody you know. Tell them about the Supreme Court case and here’s a set of sheets for you.”)

My Pillow CEO's appeal isn't new

Strange, after reading the 52-page appeal — sans sheets — I didn’t feel a shock. Not even a slight zap.

Neither, apparently, did Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

“Nothing new,” he told me on Friday. “Same old crazy. Zero percent chance the United States Supreme Court decides to spend its very limited time on something so crazy that it got sanctioned to the tune of $100,000-plus at the trial court level.”

Lake and Finchem — then candidates for governor and secretary of state and for the U.S. Senate and state Senate — sued the state of Arizona and Maricopa County in April 2022, seeking to bar vote tabulators in the 2022 election.

They claimed that even if the machines weren’t hacked, they could be hacked and there’s no way to verify the count unless we start voting with paper ballots.

Arizona elections already use paper ballots

Never mind that Arizona already uses paper ballots and, in fact, requires a hand count of a random sample of those ballots to verify the machine count.

U.S. District Court John J. Tuchi dismissed their lawsuit in August 2022, and later slapped the Lake/Finchem lawyers with sanctions and the county’s $122,000 legal bill for their “frivolous” waste of court time and taxpayers’ money.

To prevail, Tuchi said they’d have to not only prove that machines have security flaws but that someone actually manipulated the results to change the outcome of the election.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Tuchi’s dismissal in October, noting the lawsuit “relies on a ‘long chain of hypothetical contingencies’ that have never occurred in Arizona.”

Put another way, a conspiracy must be more than a figment of your imagination — or a marketing scheme to sell sheets — if you want the courts to take you seriously.

Lake and Finchem, in their Thursday appeal, say they have new evidence that warrants a “hand recount of the 2022 election and all future elections to be counted by hand.”

It's the same argument since Trump lost

Funny thing. The new evidence sounds pretty much like the same old Maricopa County-is-the-devil argument they’ve been making all along: altered software, faulty testing, coverups, the usual stuff the courts have rejected.

Add now skullduggery apparently afoot at Dominion Voting Systems. According to the appeal, Dominion configured its tabulation machines in 30 states in such a way that hackers or Dominion workers intent on mischief can easily gain access to the count.

Fend for yourselves: Legislature sends message to election workers

“While this breach has the game-changing magnitude of the Allies’ deciphering Germany’s ENIGMA machine in World War II, it is far worse,” the appeal says. “Dominion leaves the decryption keys bare, in plain text.

“Embedded Dominion employees or any malicious actor who knows where to look can gain total access and control over an election. It is like a bank telling the public they have the most secure vault in the world, and then taping the combination on the wall next to the vault door.

“Even worse, key logging features that would record system activity showing such control can also be manipulated or disabled, thereby rendering any penetration of this system nearly undetectable.”

I don’t know whether this is ENIGMA-level spy stuff that’ll shock the world.

Or whether it’s even true. They appear to offer no backup to support their claim in the 210 pages filed with the Supreme Court.

What I do know is that this appeal still doesn’t offer any evidence that Dominion’s machines — the ones various independent experts have confirmed were not connected to the internet — were hacked.

Still, Lake and Finchem insist we deserve a “do-over relief” and an end to the machine tabulation of votes in America.

Or at least, a new set of sheets.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at laurierobertsaz.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake, My Pillow CEO newest election fraud appeal is a pipe dream