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Could
Jill Stein's vote recount change the outcome of the election?
The
Green party candidate has raised funds to file for recounts in
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – but experts are skeptical
about the effort
Amanda Holpuch in
New York
Friday 25 November
2016 19.46 GMT
In two days, Jill
Stein raised more than enough money, more than $5m, to file for
recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, though her campaign
is still seeking about $2m more to cover the associated legal fees.
Results in these
battleground states were narrow, with Trump winning by just 0.3% in
Michigan, 1.2% in Pennsylvania, and 0.7% in Wisconsin. If Clinton had
won all of these states’ 46 electoral college votes, it have would
been enough for her to win the presidency.
But the recount
process is intensive, expensive and unlikely to change the outcome of
the election unless widespread voter fraud is proven. Experts have
been skeptical that is the case.
In Wisconsin –
where her team was due to file a recount motion by Friday afternoon –
election officials would have to examine millions of paper ballots
and the paper trails of the 5% of votes cast on electronic
touch-screen machines.
Wisconsin election
commission director Michael Haas told local news that the commission
was preparing for a recount, though it had not seen evidence of
interference in the state’s voting system. “We don’t have any
reason to suspect that any voting equipment has been tampered with,”
Haas said.
Unofficial results
showed Trump won Wisconsin by more than 27,000 votes. The state has
never conducted a presidential recount, but Stein’s campaign said
it would file a motion for a recount on Friday before the deadline to
do so in the state.
In Pennsylvania,
there is no paper trail – a problem election observers anticipated
ahead of the 8 November race. “The nightmare scenario would be if
Pennsylvania decides the election and it is very close. You would
have no paper records to do a recount,” Lawrence Norden, the
co-author of a report on voting machines, told the Los Angeles Times
in late October.
But because machines
there are not connected to the internet, like those in Michigan,
officials said they couldn’t be hacked.
Across the whole of
the US, about three-quarters of voters mark paper ballots that are
counted electronically by an optical scanner, according to the
nonpartisan group Verified Voting, which examines how new technology
affects voting integrity. But some states, including Pennsylvania,
rely almost entirely on touchscreen computer voting that does not
produce a paper trail. The punch card ballots that resulted in the
disputed hanging chads during the Florida recount in 2000 are no
longer used.
Trump was declared
the winner in Michigan on Thursday by 10,704 votes, and the election
director there insists there was no evidence of hacking. “It’s
just conjecture, and I don’t think that serves anyone’s good
purpose,” said Chris Thomas, the longtime director of Michigan’s
Bureau of Elections.
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Clinton
camp splits from White House on Jill Stein recount push rejected by
Trump
Clinton
lawyer cites ‘fundamental principles’ in supporting recount
Trump
calls Green candidate’s effort a ‘scam … to fill her coffers
with money’
Jon Swaine, Edward
Helmore and Sabrina Siddiqui
Sunday 27 November
2016 08.22 GMT
Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign said on Saturday it would help with efforts to
secure recounts in several states, even as the White House defended
the declared results as “the will of the American people”.
The campaign’s
general counsel, Marc Elias, said in an online post that while it had
found no evidence of sabotage, the campaign felt “an obligation to
the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary
Clinton”.
“We certainly
understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect
Hillary Clinton,” Elias wrote, “and it is a fundamental principle
of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted.”
In response,
President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement: “The people have
spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said
on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me,
‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’”
Wisconsin began
recount proceedings late on Friday after receiving a petition from
Jill Stein, the Green party candidate. Stein claims there are
irregularities in results reported by Wisconsin as well as Michigan
and Pennsylvania, where she plans to request recounts next week,
having raised millions of dollars from supporters.
Trump called Stein’s
effort a “scam” and said it was “just a way … to fill her
coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this
ridiculous recount”.
“The results of
this election should be respected instead of being challenged and
abused,” he added, “which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”
A spokeswoman for
Stein did not respond to a request for comment. Speaking to CNN,
however, Stein said she had “no contact with the Clinton campaign”
and added: “I have said consistently that if there are questions
about the accuracy and security I would challenge it, no matter who
was the winner.”
Asked what the
recount would do for her or for the Green party, Stein said: “We
want to know what our vote is, and that our votes are being counted.
This is not a partisan effort but we need to have confidence, too.
“When evidence
emerged the system was being hacked all over the place, my conviction
only strengthened that this was something we have to do.”
She did not discuss
any such evidence for her claims. Earlier in the afternoon, she had
used Twitter to say: “Election integrity cannot be led by a party
w/o integrity, just as a revolution cannot happen in a
counterrevolutionary party.”
Trump narrowly
defeated Clinton in all three states on his way to national victory,
surprising pollsters. Because Trump’s win followed warnings from US
intelligence that Russia was trying to interfere with the election,
thousands of people who opposed Trump now claim he could have had
foreign assistance.
In its first public
remarks about the election’s security, the Obama administration
said it “did not observe any increased level of malicious
cyber-activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election
day”.
A senior
administration official told the Guardian: “We believe our
elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”
Stein’s petition
to Wisconsin, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, focused
on concerns that foreign actors might have copied the state’s voter
registration database and then filed bogus absentee ballots. No
direct evidence supporting this claim was cited.
In requesting the
recounts, Stein is acting on behalf of a loose coalition of academics
and election experts. Her Wisconsin petition features an affidavit by
J Alex Halderman, the director of Michigan University’s Center for
Computer Security and Society, who has for years detailed
vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines used in the US.
One of the leaders
of the coalition, John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights
Institute, expressed frustration that critics were accusing Stein of
exploiting disappointment over the election result to collect money
and gather contact details from liberal activists.
“This was all
driven by the nonpartisan election integrity community,” said
Bonifaz, a constitutional attorney, in his first interview about the
recount effort. “I’m the one who asked Jill Stein to file these
petitions.”
Bonifaz also
defended Stein’s decision to increase her fundraising target from
its original $2.5m, which led to more criticism. Bonifaz said the
coalition had retained the New York law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff
& Abady, which has extensive experience in election disputes and
had advised them to budget $7m for the effort.
“This is going to
be a very costly campaign,” said Bonifaz, adding that the average
contribution from the tens of thousands of supporters who had donated
was about $42. “But it is something that a lot of people clearly
want.”
By Saturday
afternoon, the online fundraising effort had reached $5.8m.
In addition to
lawyers’ fees and state filing fees, the group is anticipating that
litigation will be needed against opposition to recounts. Michigan’s
election rules allow a candidate to oppose a request from another for
a recount, but it is unclear whether the Trump campaign would decide
to take advantage of this.
In his online
posting, Elias said: “Because we had not uncovered any actionable
evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting
technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves.
“But now that a
recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in
order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all
sides.”
Trump received 2m
fewer votes than Clinton nationally, but won the presidency thanks to
the electoral college. More than 7 million Americans voted for other
candidates, including Stein and the Libertarian Gary Johnson.
In Wisconsin, Trump
beat Clinton by 27,257 votes. Stein received 30,980 votes and Johnson
106,442.
Elias wrote: “If
Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts
in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those
states as well.
“We do so fully
aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton in the closest of these states” – Michigan, where the
Republican leads by 10,704 votes with the result expected to be
certified on Monday – “well exceeds the largest margin ever
overcome in a recount.
“But regardless of
the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it
is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally
represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in
order to monitor the recount process itself.”
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