The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to review a $122,000 legal-fee order against attorneys who represented former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in a lawsuit over the state’s 2022 election. The order leaves in place the lower courts’ rulings that the lawyers must pay Maricopa County’s costs. The lawsuit, brought by Lake and state lawmaker Mark Finchem, sought to bar electronic ballot-tabulation equipment and require a hand count of all ballots. A federal judge dismissed the case, finding that Lake and Finchem lacked standing to sue and had filed too close to the election. U.S. District Judge John Tuchi later concluded the lawsuit’s claims lacked an adequate factual basis and that the attorneys had not done the necessary research before filing. The fee order applies to the lawyers who pursued the case, not to Lake or Finchem. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected challenges to both the dismissal and the fee award. Attorney Andrew D. Parker, who represented Lake, asked the Supreme Court to overturn the sanctions, arguing that imposing such costs could deter attorneys from bringing aggressive or novel legal claims. Maricopa County countered that the lawyers disregarded a letter identifying false allegations and repeated some of them in a later filing. The county said the lawsuit lacked evidence for its claims and falsely asserted that Arizona did not use paper ballots and that its electronic voting systems had not been examined by experts. The court rulings put the consequences of those unsupported claims on the attorneys who filed them. Lake lost the 2022 governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Finchem, a Republican, lost his secretary of state bid to Democrat Adrian Fontes. Both had promoted claims that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.