Jill Stein Seeks Election Recount in Key States
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein looks likely to spur a last-minute recount of part of the result of the election.
Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, but two voting rights experts say the result needs to be more closely analyzed.
Jill Stein says she has gathered enough money to fund a recount in Wisconsin.
There is no indication Donald Trump’s win was down to cyberhacking, one of the experts said on November 23.
One election official in Wisconsin said they are preparing for a possible recount.
On November 22, New York Magazine first reported that a group of experts, led by voting-rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J.Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, had contacted Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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The experts urged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to request recounts in two states narrowly won by Donald Trump – Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – as well as Michigan, where he has a small lead.
In a Medium post on November 23, J. Alex Halderman repeated concerns he has voiced in the past over the vulnerabilities of paperless voting machines.
The fact that the results in the three states were different from what polls predicted was “probably not” down to hacking, Halderman said. Concerns over possible Russian interference were expressed in the run-up to the vote.
“The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence ,” he wrote.
There is a deadline for any candidates to demand a recount, and they need to pay fees to file a request.
The deadline for Wisconsin is November 25. Pennsylvania’s is November 28, and Michigan’s is November 30.
This is where Jill Stein comes in – on her website, the Green Party candidate wrote that recounts were needed “to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the US election system is”.
By yesterday, Jill Stein had raised, through a crowdfunding campaign, more than $2.5 million, enough to fund a recount request in Wisconsin. The campaign estimates that up to $7 million may be needed to pay for recounts in all three states.
Unofficial results from Wisconsin showed Donald Trump won by only 27,000 votes, media in the state say.
Jill Stein won only 1% of the votes in Wisconsin.
Before then, Wisconsin had gone with the Democrats for seven elections running.
A Clinton victory in Wisconsin alone would not have been enough to overturn Donald Trump’s lead – it provides only 10 votes in the crucial electoral college that gave him victory. But wins in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would have clinched the presidency for the Democrat.
The Wisconsin State Journal quoted the state’s election commission director Michael Haas as saying that the organization had not seen “any reason to suspect that any voting equipment has been tampered with”.
The commission was now preparing for a recount, Michael Haas told the Journal, adding that such a move would be “unprecedented”.