The Arizona Supreme Court ordered defeated GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's attorneys pay $2,000 in sanctions for making an "unequivocally false" claim that more than 35,000 ballots were "injected" into Maricopa County's total after the election.

Catch up quick: In her challenge of the Arizona Court of Appeals' rejection of her case in March, Lake's attorneys said it's an "undisputed fact" that 35,563 "unaccounted for ballots" were added to the county's total at a third-party processing facility run by Runbeck Election Services.

• The claim was based on a discrepancy between the estimated number of ballots received by Runbeck and a subsequent count.
• Estimates come from the number of trays of ballots delivered to Runbeck and "estimated weight count," as attorneys for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs noted in a legal filing.
• The state Supreme Court in March dismissed six of seven claims Lake made challenging her loss to Democrat Hobbs last November, and ruled the trial court must hear arguments in a seventh claim that was improperly dismissed.

Driving the news: Chief Justice Robert Brutinel said Lake's claim was not only "strongly disputed" but also unsupported by the case record.

Yes, but: The court denied requests by Hobbs and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes that Lake be ordered to pay attorney fees.

What they're saying: Brutinel acknowledged that "attendant hyperbole" from campaigns sometimes spills into election-related legal challenges, "But once a contest...

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