Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks at a campaign rally
in Chicago, Illinois, US 8 September 2016. | Reuters/Jim Young
Green Party
presidential nominee Jill Stein is pushing for vote recounts in
Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, three traditionally Democratic
states where Donald Trump did much better than expected on Nov. 8. And
donors pitched in to fund them, surpassing a $2 million goal in just
hours.
Trump pulled off historic upsets that
night in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Michigan has yet to be called, but
he is projected to win there as well.
Stein’s press director made the
announcement in a Facebook livestream on Wednesday afternoon, and
donations for the effort surged into a fundraising site,
topping its $2 million goal by late Wednesday. Stein’s campaign had
called on supporters to provide $2 million by Friday afternoon to start
the process in Wisconsin. Its statement references “compelling evidence
of voting anomalies” and “significant discrepancies in vote totals” in
the three states.
The news comes days ahead of the states’ deadlines to file recount requests. Wisconsin’s deadline is Friday; Pennsylvania’s is Monday and Michigan’s is Wednesday, Nov. 30.
Wisconsin is already preparing
for a recount based on the Stein campaign’s statements, Michael Haas,
state Elections Commission director, told the Wisconsin State Journal.
He added that officials know of no evidence the state’s election results
were manipulated.
Stein’s call follows a Tuesday night report
in New York magazine saying a group of election lawyers and computer
scientists have contacted Hillary Clinton’s team to advocate for a
recount of the votes in those states.
J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor in that group, explained his reasoning in a Wednesday post on Medium:
I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls [showing Clinton winning those three states] were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.
As one of the presidential candidates on
the ballot across the nation, Stein is one of the few people able to
put the process of examining evidence in motion.
Trump has little incentive to challenge a
result that handed him the presidency, and it would be politically
difficult for Clinton to do so because of her repeated demand that Trump
accept the results of the election and because of reported pressurefrom
the Obama administration to avoid complicating the transition. Gary
Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, has not expressed an interest in a
recount.
Stein’s move is likely to be embraced by
some of Clinton’s most loyal supporters, who have been cheering talk of
recounts and other ways to change the outcome, including convincing Electoral College members to refuse to vote Trump, even if their state did. They note that Clinton has a lead in the popular vote of
more than 2 million. That number is expected to increase as counting
continues; 2 million votes remain to be counted in California alone.
It’s an unlikely coalition, given Stein’s persistent criticisms of Clinton, the many problems
with her movement and the Clinton camp’s anger for supposedly pulling
away votes they felt might have gone to the Democratic nominee.
Stein won tens of thousands of votes in
states that went to Trump ― including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and
Michigan. Still, the Republican nominee would likely have won even if all of Stein’s votes had gone to Clinton. The Green Party candidate ended up with about 1 percent of the national vote.
Stein has continued to critique Clinton following the election. But she’s no fan of the president-elect either, saying in recent days that he is wrong
to overstate his role in the battle over the Trans-Pacific Partnership
and calling for Americans to combat trends that enabled his rise.
According to a Clinton aide, they are not yet commenting publicly on the deliberations around the recount.
If you think Clinton should push forward
with it, or you think she should let it rest, we’ve put together two
different petitions. You can tell her how you feel below. The top one calls for her to go for it, the bottom one asks her to move on and accept that it’s over.
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