Update: Defendants Move To Dismiss ‘MyPillow’ Guy’s Frivolous Lawsuit Filed By Election Deniers ‘Krazy Kari’ Lake And Insurrectionist Coup Plotter Mark Finchem

Howard Fischer reports, Lawsuit vs. voting machines factually flawed, Maricopa County claims:

A lawsuit [filed in April] by two [Election Denier] Republican candidates seeking to require a hand count of the 2022 election is both legally and factually flawed, a lawyer for Maricopa County is telling a federal judge.

Howie does not clarify that this is a Rule 12(b)(6) Motion to Dismiss for failure to state a claim. There is also a Rule 12(b)(6) Motion to Dismiss for failure to state a claim from Pima County, also a defendant in this frivolous lawsuit, which is not metioned in Howies report.

Dear media colleagues: You've been had. The Lake/Finchem suit was filed in April seeking to bar use of counting machines. Wednesday's filing was more of the same, with House-paid press release perhaps designed to overshadow response from counties and sec of state.

— Capitol Media Services 📢 Telling it like it is (@azcapmedia) June 9, 2022

Candidates “Krazy Kari” Lake, running for governor, and [insurrectionst Coup Plotter] Mark Finchem, running for secretary of state, claim counting machines are unreliable because they are subject to fraud and hacking.

Those claims are based on mere allegations from states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Colorado “but not Arizona or Maricopa County,” said Emily Craiger, lawyer for Arizona’s most populous county, in a new 21-page legal filing.

She told Judge John Tuchi that allegations machines are vulnerable because of “foreign manufacturing of components by hostile nations” are so generic as to not even merit his consideration.

Craiger also pointed out that Arizona law requires various checks of counting equipment both before and after each election. There’s also a random hand count of selected races in at least 2% of the precincts to compare the tally made by volunteers from both major parties with what the machine recorded.

She also told Tuchi a hand count of all ballots — nearly 2.1 million in Maricopa County alone — would be impossible. It took the firm hired by the Senate to audit the 2020 election more than three months, she pointed out, and that count was only of the presidential and U.S. senate races.

“But ballots in Maricopa County seldom have fewer than 10 races in a primary,” Craiger said. “A general election, which includes judicial retention races, can have 60 to 70 races to count.”

Moreover, Craiger pointed out that Lake and Finchem are contending there are harms from machine counting of ballots dating back to 2002. They acknowledged in their lawsuit they were aware that in 2019, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs certified the specific Dominion Voting System used in Maricopa County that they now contend is unreliable.

“Yet plaintiffs waited until April 22, 2022 — when both were running for statewide office — to file suit,” Craiger told the judge, saying that’s beyond the two-year statute of limitations. “Apparently, raising these concerns was not politically expedient during the limitations period.”

In a separate filing, an attorney for Hobbs listed her own reasons for saying Tuchi should toss the lawsuit by the two would-be state officials.

Howie again does not clarify that this is a Rule 12 (b)(6) Motion to Dismiss for failure to state a claim from the Secretary of State’s office.

“They allege no facts sufficient to give rise to an inference that their right to vote has been or will be violated,” wrote the secretary of states’s lawyer, Roopali Desai.

She told the judge the complaint “contains only sheer conjecture about possible hacking of electronic voting equipment and irrelevant allegations about other jurisdictions.”

The filings come as Lake and Finchem on Wednesday renewed their request for a preliminary injunction prohibiting the use of any electronic voting systems to count ballots in any future Arizona election.

“Computerized equipment is vulnerable to manipulation by unauthorized persons, meaning the true results of an election that relies upon computerized equipment can never be known,” wrote Andrew Parker, their attorney.

Andrew Parker is the “MyPillow” guy Mike Lindell’s lawyer, with the Minneapolis-based Parker Daniels Kibort.  Disreputable celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz is an adviser to the “MyPillow” election denier legal team. Mike Lindell And Alan Dershowitz Team Up For Election LOLsuit To Ban All Voting Machines:

Last month Pillow Puffer Mike Lindell threatened to “sue all the machines.”

“I’ve been working on it five months, and we’re doing a class action” he told the crowd at a rally for Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. (Who is a Lu. Na. Tic.)

“It’s a class action lawsuit against all machines, that they’re defective devices, okay?” he continued. “I have lawyers worked on this for five months. We’re getting county commissioners, county clerks, they’re all the plaintiffs. And we’ve already got about 300 on board, and we’re going to get rid of these machines once and for all, for any election in history.”

Well, not exactly.

[T]here are only two plaintiffs on this “class action lawsuit against all machines,” Lake and state Rep. Mark Finchem, a Qanon supporting member of the far right Oath Keepers militia who is running for secretary of state.

The lead attorney, Andrew Parker, has represented the MyPillow CEO on various election matters, including his pending case against the January 6 Select Committee. He’s being assisted by MAGA lawyer/troll Kurt Olsen, whose many election ratfucking hits include Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Supreme Court LOLsuit against seven swing states to invalidate their electoral votes.

With special guest star … DRUMROLL PLEASE …

Alan M. Dershowitz, of Boca Raton, Florida, who needs no introduction.

The suit, which is being subsidized by Lindell, styles itself as “a civil rights action for declaratory and injunctive relief,” and seeks to block the use of electronic voting machines in Arizona for the 2022 midterms.

[B]ut Lake and Finchem aren’t filing this POS for themselves alone; they claim to be vindicating the rights of all citizens in Arizona.  And therein lies the problem.

Because in Bowyer v. Ducey, aka “the Arizona Kraken” suit, US District Judge Diane Humetewa already ruled that being an elector (i.e. a voter) does not give a plaintiff Article III standing. And although they are candidates for office, Finchem and Lake claim to represent the interests of all Arizona voters, which is just the kind of “non-particularized” injury that got all those crap cases tossed after the 2020 election.

Also, Judge Humetewa found that standing based on vote dilution is not a thing, although, as a practical matter, if every state in the union is using voting machines, then everyone’s vote is equally compromised, and Arizonans are no worse off than anyone else.

Note to Howie and the rest of the Arizona media: these key details should be included in every report you do about this frivolous lawsuit from election deniers.

Parker dismissed the idea that results of such counting equipment, which he refers to as “the black box voting system,” can ever be counted on as accurate, saying that even audits won’t find machines that were compromised.

“A malicious program can be written to delete traces that it ever ran, including deleting itself,” he told the judge, relying on and quoting from an affidavit by Doug Logan. Logan is the owner of Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired by state Senate President Karen Fann to audit the 2020 election. He came up with a report citing what he said were flaws, vulnerabilities and missing files.

But Craiger said much in the Cyber Ninjas report on which Lake and Finchem are relying was debunked when the county, in cooperation with the Senate, had a “special master” examine the equipment and found it was not — and could not be — connected to the internet.

“The special master’s report discredits all of the Cyber Ninjas’ speculative findings — relied on by the complaint — concerning alleged authorized access, malware present or internet access to these systems that basic cyber security best practices and guidelines were not followed,” she said.

Craiger, in the new legal filings, also told Tuchi there is no basis for the claim that using vote tabulation equipment is unconstitutional.

She pointed out the U.S. Constitution leaves the question of how to administer elections to each state. The only time that is overruled, Craiger said, is if Congress passes a law about races where federal candidates are on the ballot, something it has not done.

“So Arizona’s legislature is authorized to make that policy decision,” she said.

She said that means lawmakers are free to require, as they have, that ballots here are counted by electronic tabulation machines followed by the 2% hand audit count.

Parker, the attorney for Lake and Finchem, made new legal filings himself Wednesday, in hopes of getting the judge to declare machine counting illegal. He cited a statement issued earlier this month by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that there are “vulnerabilities” in certain Dominion voting systems.

That report says these vulnerabilities should be mitigated as soon as possible. But it also says “CISA has no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections.”

Tuchi has not set a date to hear arguments.

Judge Tuchi should be able to dismiss this frivolous lawsuit on the pleadings alone, oral argument isn’t necessary.