Judge calls election lawsuit ‘baseless,’ orders Kari Lake, Mark Finchem to pay court fees

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But Tuchi said the big problem with the arguments of why machine counts are unreliable is they are based on a lot of "what if" speculations.

"A long chain of hypothetical contingencies must take place for any harm to occur," he wrote. That includes:

The specific voting equipment used in Arizona must have security failures that allow a malicious actor to manipulate vote totals;

Such an actor must actually manipulate an election;

Arizona's specific procedural safeguards must fail to detect the manipulation; and

The manipulation must change the outcome of the election.

"Plaintiffs fail to plausibly show that Arizona's voting equipment even has such security failures," the judge said. "And even if the allegations in plaintiff's complaint were plausible, their alleged injury is not certainly impending."

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“It is to make clear that the Court,” Judge Tuchi wrote. “Will not condone litigants ignoring the steps that Arizona has already taken toward [elections] and furthering false narratives that baselessly undermine public trust at a time of increasing disinformation about, and distrust in, the democratic process. It is to send a message to those who might file similarly baseless suits in the future.”

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