Kari Lake and Mark Finchem continue their quest to outlaw Arizona’s vote counting machines, telling the U.S. Supreme Court they have “new evidence” that merits a “do-over” hand recount of the 2022 election.

All week long, MyPillowCEO Mike Lindell, who is underwriting their lawsuit, has been claiming to have found “the most explosive evidence ever!”.

“It’s going to be the biggest thing ever, and we are going to save this country!” he said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast over the weekend.

By Thursday, he’d upgraded his promise to one of global import.“It’s going to shock the world,” he told Bannon, adding that people should buy some his percale sheets to pass out to their friends along with the Supreme Court appeal.  (“Get ‘em for everybody you know. Tell them about the Supreme Court case and here’s a set of sheets for you.”)

Strange, after reading the 52-page appeal – sans sheets — I didn’t feel a shock. Not even a slight zap.

Neither, apparently, did Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

“Nothing new,” he told me on Friday. “Same old crazy. Zero percent chance the United States Supreme Court decides to spend its very limited time on something so crazy that it got sanctioned to the tune of $100,000-plus at the trial court level.”

Lake and Finchem — then candidates for governor and secretary of state and now candidates for the U.S. Senate and state Senate — sued the state and Maricopa County in April 2022, asking a judge to bar the machine counting of votes in the 2022 election.

In their lawsuit, they claimed that even if the tabulation machines weren’t hacked, they could be hacked and there’s no way to verify the machine count unless we start voting with paper ballots.

Never mind that Arizona already uses paper ballots and in fact requires a hand count of a random sample of those ballots, to verify the machine count.

U.S. District Court John J. Tuchi threw out their lawsuit in August 2022 and later slapped the Lake/Finchem lawyers with sanctions and the county’s $122,000 legal bill for their “frivolous” waste of court time and taxpayer money.

To prevail, Tuchi said they’d have to not only prove that tabulation machines have security flaws but that someone actually manipulated the results to change the outcome of the election.

The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld Tuchi’s dismissal in October, noting the lawsuit “relies on a ‘long chain of hypothetical contingencies’ that have never occurred in Arizona.”

Put another way, a conspiracy must be more than a figment of your imagination — or a marketing scheme to sell sheets — if you want the courts to take you seriously.

Lake and Finchem, in their Thursday appeal to the Supreme Court, say they now have new evidence that warrants a hand recount of the 2022 election and all future elections.

Funny thing. Their new evidence sounds pretty much like the same old Maricopa-County-is-the-devil argument they’ve been making since Trump lost Arizona in 2020… altered software, faulty testing, coverups, the usual stuff the courts have rejected.

Add to that now skullduggery apparently afoot at Dominion Voting Systems. Lake and Finchem, in their appeal, say Dominion configured its tabulation machines in 30 states in such a way that hackers or Dominion workers intent on mischief can easily gain access to balloting.

“While this (security) breach has the game-changing magnitude of the Allies’ deciphering Germany’s ENIGMA machine in World War II, it is far worse,” the appeal says. “Dominion leaves the decryption keys bare, in plain text.

“Embedded Dominion employees or any malicious actor who knows where to look can gain total access and control over an election. It is like a bank telling the public they have the most secure vault in the world, and then taping the combination on the wall next to the vault door.

“Even worse, key logging features that would record system activity showing such control can also be manipulated or disabled, thereby rendering any penetration of this system nearly undetectable.”

I don’t know whether this rises to the level of explosive ENIGMA-level spy stuff that’ll shock the world. Or whether it is even true. They don’t appear to offer any source for their claim in the 210 pages filed with the Supreme Court..

What I do know is that this appeal still doesn’t offer any evidence that Dominion’s machines – the ones the county and various independent experts have said were not connected to the internet — were hacked.

Still the Lake/Finchem attorneys insist it should be enough not only for a “do-over” hand count of Arizona’s 2022 election but also an end to the machine tabulation of votes in America.

“The weakness in voting infrastructure requires resolution before the 2024 election,” their appeal says. “Without resolution, election results in the numerous states with Dominion voting machines—at the very least—cannot be trusted.”

At least, not without a new set of sheets.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerlyTwitter, at @LaurieRoberts or on Threads at laurierobertsaz.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Mike Lindell’s and Kari Lake’s ‘explosive’ new evidence goes pffft