Trump lead barely slips in state

Recount on track to meet deadline

Madison — Wisconsin’s presidential recount is 70% done but the effort has resulted in almost no change to President-elect Donald Trump’s winning margin in the state, election officials said.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission said Democrat Hillary Clinton has gained 82 votes so far on Trump, a Republican who won the Nov. 8 election in the state by more than 22,000 votes.

The recount is on schedule to finish by the Monday deadline for local officials and the Tuesday deadline for the state, with 34 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties and the city of Milwaukee already finished, according to the state commission and Milwaukee Election Commission Executive Director Neil Albrecht. Some of the state’s biggest counties, including Dane and Brown, are still counting by hand or machine, however.

Clinton has picked up 492 votes so far in the recount, but has gained almost no ground since Trump gained 410 votes in this new tally and led by 22,177 votes going into the recount.

Green Party candidate Jill Stein, whose campaign paid $3.5 million to ensure Wisconsin did a recount, has gained only 60 votes. That works out to more than $58,000 for each vote that Stein has gained in the recount up to now.

The Elections Commission, which is run by three Democrats and three Republicans, dismissed fake news stories being spread on social media that votes for Trump were being counted twice in Waukesha County or not being shown to observers. Ballots there were sometimes scanned face down in the recount but only after campaign representatives had a chance to view and question them, state officials said.

Vote counting equipment in St. Croix County has also been checked and is working correctly, commission staff said. There were false reports of tampering with that equipment because an authorized technician broke some of their seals and did not have any replacement seals to put on the machines to certify his work had been official, state officials said.

Meanwhile in Michigan, which Trump won by by 10,700 votes, a federal judge who ordered that state to start recounting presidential votes has dropped his decision, effectively ending a second look at ballots statewide. Judge Mark Goldsmith acted Wednesday night, a day after the state appeals court said the Green Party candidate isn’t eligible to seek a recount of millions of vote cast Nov. 8.

The state appeals court said Tuesday that Jill Stein doesn’t qualify as an “aggrieved” candidate under state law because

she got only 1% of the Michigan vote and can’t win with a recount.

The recount in Wisconsin has turned up mostly human errors, according to the Elections Commission. In Marinette County, ballots had to be handcounted because voters had been given the wrong kind of pens, which

caused scanning machines to fail to count 309 ballots.

A federal judge last week denied an emergency halt to the recount of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, allowing the process to continue until a Friday court hearing at least. Trump supporters had filed a lawsuit to stop Wisconsin's recount and safeguard the presidentelect's victory here.