Supreme Court turns away Kari Lake lawyer’s challenge to sanctions in Arizona voting machine lawsuit

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal from a lawyer who was sanctioned while representing former GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in a 2022 lawsuit challenging Arizona’s use of electronic voting machines.

The high court did not provide any explanation for its decision, leaving intact an appeals court ruling that upheld the sanctions.

The lawsuit sought to force local election officials to use alternative methods to collect and count ballots for the 2022 midterms. It claimed that electronic systems used in Maricopa and Pima counties were unreliable and “vulnerable to attack and manipulation.”

The suit was filed that April, when Lake was running for governor and fellow Republican Mark Finchem was running for Arizona secretary of state. Both ultimately lost their elections.

A federal judge dismissed the suit in August 2022 for lack of standing. Lake’s legal team, including Andrew Parker and Kurt Olsen, was later ordered to pay $122,200 in sanctions after the judge found the claims were frivolous.

“Failing to impose meaningful sanctions here might very well encourage others to follow suit by lending their credibility to documents filed in court without facing any real consequence if their certifications prove hollow or incomplete,” U.S. District Judge John Tuchi wrote in his 2023 ruling. “The need for general deterrence is therefore significant.”

A divided panel for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the sanctions in the spring of 2025.

Parker’s lawyer had urged the Supreme Court to reverse that decision, citing a dissent from six 9th Circuit judges who objected to the full court’s decision not to rehear the case and criticized Tuchi’s intent to “send a message” as an attempt to chill “politically disfavored litigation.”

“Permitting its sanctions decision in this case to stand will close the door to creative, aggressive, or novel claims and arguments for any client or lawyer unable to afford the cost of a sanctions order if the district court finds the arguments contrary to its own view of sound public policy,” attorney Nathan Lewin argued.

Olsen, who was sanctioned alongside Parker, was not listed as a party in the petition.

In response, attorneys for Maricopa County accused Parker of mischaracterizing the situation.

“Contrary to Petitioners’ claims, they were not sanctioned because they brought a long-shot, novel, or politically disfavored lawsuit,” they wrote. “Nor were they sanctioned because they challenged election procedures, or because they represented disfavored clients.”

“Petitioners were sanctioned because they made objectively false and misleading statements in documents that they signed and filed in a federal district court,” the attorneys added, also arguing Lake’s lawyers “unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings” by ignoring warnings of potential frivolousness.

The Supreme Court previously rejected Lake and Finchem’s request to revive their lawsuit in 2024.