Clinton campaign will participate in Greens-led Wisconsin recount
UNITED STATES: Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has been quietly exploring whether there was any ‘‘outside interference’’ in the election results and will participate in the election recount in Wisconsin initiated by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign lawyer said yesterday.
Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias said in a Medium post that the campaign has received ‘‘hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton,’’ especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the ‘‘combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes.’’
Elias said the campaign has ‘‘not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology.’’ But because of the margin of victory - and the degree of apparent foreign interference during the campaign - Elias said that Clinton officials had ‘‘quietly taken a number of steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states.’’
He said that the Clinton campaign will participate in the Stein-initiated recount in Wisconsin by having representatives on the ground monitoring the count and having lawyers represent them in court if needed. And if Stein makes good on efforts to prompt similar processes in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Elias said, the Clinton campaign would do so there, as well. ’’The campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities,’’ Elias said. ‘‘While that effort has not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation of results, now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported.’’
The recount effort is somewhat unusual in that it comes weeks after Clinton conceded - and at the request and with the financial backing of a thirdparty candidate, Stein, who has no chance of winning, said election-law expert Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine. Clinton, too, has virtually no chance of altering the result, given that she would have to reverse not just Wisconsin but also Michigan and Pennsylvania to become president, Hasen said.
In a statement, Trump said the recount was ‘‘just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one per cent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money’’ and said the election results should be ‘‘respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.’’
‘‘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,’ ‘‘ Trump said.
For her part, Stein took to Twitter to question Clinton’s motives for participating in the recount effort.
‘‘Why would Hillary Clinton - who conceded the election to Donald Trump want #Recount2016?’’ Stein wrote. ‘‘You cannot be on-again, off-again about democracy.’’
Recounts can change outcomes. Sen. Al Franken, D-minn., famously defeated Norm Coleman for the seat he now holds after a months-long recount and legal battle, even though Coleman seemed initially to have a lead. But the margins are usually in the hundreds, not thousands, and typically recounts are initiated by candidates in close races refusing to accept defeat, as is the case in the North Carolina gubernatorial race between incumbent Pat Mccrory (R) and Democrat Roy Cooper, Hasen said.
‘‘I don’t think there’s any realistic chance whatsoever that even if recounts are done in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that’s going to change the outcome in the states, or in the presidential election generally,’’ Hasen said.
Trump won 1,404,000 votes in Wisconsin, according to the state’s election commission, while Clinton had 1,381,823. The Wisconsin recount will be conducted by county boards of canvassers, who must move quickly to meet a mid-december deadline to ensure the state’s electoral votes are counted. Stein has to file by Monday to prompt a recount in Pennsylvania, and by Wednesday to trigger a recount in Michigan. The results in that state are not technically certified until Monday.
The presidential campaign was marked by fears that Russian hacking might affect the outcome, especially after the hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and were found to have attempted intrusions on voter registration databases. The Washington Post also recently reportedthat Russians created and spread fake news about the election with the apparent goal of helping Trump. - Washington Post