Maricopa County can't collect on its legal fees against unsuccessful candidate for Arizona governor. A separate ruling, however, says Mark Finchem, needs to pay fees in his challenge to losing the race for secretary of state.
Howard Fischer PHOENIX — Kari Lake will not have to pay court-ordered penalties even though a judge rejected her latest bid to overturn the 2022 gubernatorial election.
Mark Finchem, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for secretary of state, and his attorneys were not so lucky. Judge: Lake’s claim not establishedThompson, in his ruling in the Lake case, said that means a claim is “groundless” or, to put another way, that there are no rational arguments based on evidence or law to support it.
The judge took pains on how his decision here differs from the actions by the Arizona Supreme Court earlier this month to impose a $2,000 sanction against Lake’s lawyers who were reviewing one of Thompson’s earlier rulings ‘Groundless’ legal challengeIn the race for secretary of state, Julian reached a different conclusion than Thompson on the merits of the case brought by Finchem. She found that his legal effort to overturn the election results was “groundless and not brought in good faith.’’
“Yet, Finchem lost the election he challenged by 120,208 votes,” the judge noted. “The margin was so significant that even if it were assumed that 80,000 votes were missing and that those votes would all have been cast in his favor, the result of the election would not have changed.” Twitter is not an election official, and its separate decision in October 2022 to temporarily suspend Finchem’s account is not a valid basis to challenge the outcome of an election, the judge said.
“This should have been a deterrent,” Julian wrote. “At a minimum, concerns raised by other attorneys should have prompted further investigation into the contest’s validity.”
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