Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has been given more than enough money to push for a general election recount. Now Hillary Clinton’s campaign has gotten on board to question the election results in key swing states that Donald J. Trump won and helped drive him to the White House.
Stein was compelled to call for the recounts after reading a New York Magazine article where a group of computer scientists and election lawyers said that they “found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.”
Stein said the recounts are an “election integrity movement” that aims to “shine a light on just how untrustworthy the US election system is.”
Stein told PBS, “This is not being done to benefit one candidate at the expense of the other.” However, the recounts are only being done in states where Trump won by small margins. Clinton won Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Nevada by fewer votes than Trump won Pennsylvania. Trump won Pennsylvania by approximately 78,000 votes, whereas Hillary won New Hampshire by less than 3,000 votes, won Minnesota by less than 44,000 votes and Nevada by around 26,000 votes.
Stein initially asked for $2.5 million to crowdfund the recount. Once that goal was reached she raised the goal to $4 million. Once that goal was reached she raised the goal to $7 million.
However, Stein stated these were the costs in doing a recount:
Wisconsin: $1.1 million
Pennsylvania: $0.5 million
Michigan: $0.6 million
Stein states that the new costs are to pay for possible attorney costs.
“This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing,” President-elect Trump said.
There’s also no guarantee the recounts will go ahead, with the money raised going toward filings that may be turned down. Even Stein herself said the election is “unlikely” to overturned.
“It should go without saying that we take these concerns extremely seriously,” writes Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s campaign. “We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted.”
Elias also notes on his piece in Medium that his camp’s investigation has not uncovered anything pointing to sabotage.
If the votes in all three states were overturned, Clinton would technically have the edge in electoral college votes — 278 to Trump’s revised 260.
The New York Times highly doubted the success of a recount effort:
Tellingly, the pleas for recounts have gained no support from the Clinton campaign, which has concluded, along with outside experts, that it is highly unlikely the outcome would change even after an expensive and time-consuming review of ballots.
However, there are some large holes in the hacking theory, especially in Michigan. Chris Thomas, the longtime director of Michigan’s Bureau of Elections, explained that Michigan doesn’t even use the electronic voting machines identified in the report as being the sources of potential hacking.
“We are an entire paper and optical scan state,” Thomas told the Free Press on Wednesday. “Nothing is connected to the Internet.”
The other huge issue is that these conspiracy theory-loving computer scientists don’t actually have proof of hacking, it’s more of a hunch.
From FiveThirtyEight:
The New York article includes just one example, a finding that Clinton did worse in counties in Wisconsin that used electronic voting machines instead of paper ballots. It’s not clear what data the group was using to call for a recount in Michigan and Pennsylvania, or if it was looking at data at all: It could have chosen those states because they were the ones besides Wisconsin that Trump won with the smallest margins. Bonifaz, Halderman and the Clinton campaign officials mentioned in the article didn’t respond to requests for comment or more detail about the study.
“He (Halderman) laid out an argument based not on any specific suspicious vote counts but on evidence that voting machines could be hacked, and that using paper ballots as a reference point could help determine if there were hacks,” the article says.
FiveThirtyEight did their own research and “checked the six other states with a margin between Clinton and Trump of less than 10 percentage points that use a mix of paper and machine voting: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.”
The result:
“We found no apparent correlation between voting method and outcome in six of the eight states, and a thin possible link between voting method and results in Wisconsin and Texas. However, the two states showed opposite results: The use of any machine voting in a county was associated with a 5.6-percentage-point reduction in Democratic two-party vote share in Wisconsin but a 2.7-point increase in Texas, both of which were statistically significant. Even if we focus only on Wisconsin, the effect disappears when we weight our results by population. More than 75 percent of Wisconsin’s population lives in the 23 most populous counties, which don’t appear to show any evidence for an effect driven by voting systems. To have effectively manipulated the statewide vote total, hackers probably would have needed to target some of these larger counties. When we included all counties but weighted the regression by the number of people living in each county, the statistical significance of the opposite effects in Wisconsin and Texas both evaporated.”
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and is now a senior adviser, said Clinton’s campaign was “a pack of sore losers.” She added, “After asking Mr. Trump and his team a million times on the trail, ‘Will HE accept the election results?’ it turns out Team Hillary and their new BFF Jill Stein can’t accept reality.”
“Rather than adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding and wishing the winner well, they’ve opted to waste millions of dollars and dismiss the democratic process. The people have spoken. Time to listen up. #YesYourPresident,” Conway said.
Of course we shouldn’t forget that just last month, Hillary Clinton said, “To say that you won’t respect the results of the election is a direct threat to our democracy.”