An appeals court in Arizona has upheld financial penalties for the Arizona state Republican Party stemming from the defeat of a lawsuit it brought challenging key portions of the results from the 2020 presidential election. The party itself brought multiple lawsuits overall, in addition to the litigation that took place in other states and judicial venues — none of which, of course, stopped Biden’s win as securely documented state by state.
This lawsuit, like other complaints both inside and outside of court from aggrieved Republicans, challenged the handling of elections in Maricopa County, which is Arizona’s largest by population and also figured in disputes brought after the 2022 elections from failed Republican candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake. She has repeatedly mischaracterized the reach and impact of problems with ballot printers at county polling places on Election Day, even citing data that in reality simply showed the number of individual times a ballot wasn’t read properly by an onsite scanner rather than a total of individual ballots that somehow went uncounted.
In this older lawsuit, Republicans “tried unsuccessfully to postpone the certification of election results in Maricopa County and seek a new audit of a sampling of ballots,” as the Associated Press explained.
The some $18,000 in penalties for the state party will cover legal fees incurred by the other side once they’re eventually paid. The appeals court rejected any argument that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bars linking the lower-court judge’s conclusions about the groundless nature of the original case to financial penalties for the losers. Trump, meanwhile, continues promoting the incessantly debunked narrative of a stolen election in the 2020 contests.
