SHE DEFINITELY IS THE FUTURE OF TRUMPISM:

Lawyers for failed candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, who ran for governor and secretary of state of Arizona, respectively, will have to fork over some cash thanks to a judge's ruling stemming from a baseless lawsuit the candidates filed in April.  [...]

Tuchi's ruling reads like an elementary civics worksheet, going to pains to reiterate that Arizona's elections already use a paper ballot-based system, contrary to Lake and Finchem's claims and their demands that Arizona implement such a system. 

The judge added that the lawsuit falsely claimed that Arizona's electronic voting systems aren't evaluated by objective experts. 

He concluded that the attorneys -- who were not named in the ruling -- acted "recklessly" and in "bad faith."

"Plaintiffs never put forth sufficient allegations about Arizona's election systems -- let alone sufficient evidence to support any such allegations -- to demonstrate a likelihood that Arizonans' votes would be incorrectly counted in the 2022 midterm election due to manipulation," Tuchi wrote. 

The judge made clear that sanctioning the attorneys didn't clear Lake and Finchem themselves from acting inappropriately -- "far from it," he wrote. (On Twitter, Finchem and Lake both predictably attributed the ruling to a judge appointed by Barack Obama.)

"To sanction Plaintiffs' counsel here is not to let Plaintiffs off the hook," the judge wrote. "It is to penalize specific attorney conduct with the broader goal of deterring similarly baseless filings initiated by anyone, whether an attorney or not."

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