Mike Lindell And Alan Dershowitz Team Up For Election LOLsuit To Ban All Voting Machines

Because 2020 will never never end.

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.

As with his much bruited promise to march into the Supreme Court on Thanksgiving flanked by a squadron of Republican state attorneys general, there 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.

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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.

The plaintiffs lay out 20-odd pages of anecdata in support of their theory that electronic voting is prone to fraud and manipulation, strongly implying that Dominion Voting Systems is a nefarious actor who cannot be trusted. They allege that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (who is also running for governor) and various members of the Maricopa and Pima County Boards of Supervisors have failed in their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, and thus the court must ban all voting machines in Arizona and force it to run the midterms using only paper ballots, counted by hand.

“The recent hand count in Maricopa County, the second largest voting jurisdiction in the United States, offers Defendant Hobbs a proof-of-concept and a superior alternative to relying on corruptible electronic voting systems,” they write without apparent irony.

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The hand recount, AKA the Arizona “Fraudit,” was a total shitshow, took six months, and confirmed the result of the original ballot. Whatever concept this was supposed to “prove,” it seems to have fallen a bit wide of the mark.

Rather like the instant LOLsuit, which purports to vindicate the plaintiffs’ Equal Protection and Due Process rights, as well as their right to vote. But 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.

By requiring Plaintiffs to vote using electronic voting systems in the Midterm Election which are unsecure and vulnerable to manipulation and intrusion there will be an unequal voting tabulation of votes treating Plaintiffs who vote in Arizona differently than other, similarly situated voters who cast ballots in the same election.

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.

But perhaps we are overthinking it. This is, after all, a tire fire which just happens to be located on the federal docket. Best to marvel and the spectacle and wait for some poor beleaguered law clerk to put the damn thing out.

Lake v. Hobbs [Docket via Court Listener]


Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.