Trump, allies challenge recount efforts in 3 states
LANSING, Mich. — President-elect Donald Trump and his allies have filed separate legal challenges in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a robust effort to stop the presidential election recount efforts there.
None of the challenges immediately derailed the recounts in those states, but they promised to complicate them with more legal wrangling by Trump, groups supportive of him, state officials and Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate. Stein initiated the recounts and a successful fundraising drive after suggesting that voting machines were susceptible to hacking.
On Friday, Trump filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Appeals in an attempt to block the recount there, which had not yet begun.
Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general and a Republican, filed a separate lawsuit in a bid to halt the recount, saying that it put the state’s voters at risk of “paying millions and potentially losing their voice in the Electoral College in the process.”
In Wisconsin, a lawsuit against the state Elections Commission was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court by the Great America PAC, the Stop Hillary PAC and Ronald R. Johnson, a Wisconsin resident. The lawsuit said that the recount could “unjustifiably cast doubt” on Trump’s victory in that state.
The plaintiffs argued that the recount, which began across the state’s 72 counties on Thursday morning, should be halted immediately, in part because there was a substantial chance that it cannot be accurately completed by mid-December.
A U.S. judge said Friday he would not halt the recount but allowed the lawsuit to proceed.
Lawyers for Trump and his allies also are seeking to halt legal proceedings by Stein to contest the statewide election results in Pennsylvania.
The chance that these state recounts could reverse the outcome of the 2016 election was “essentially zero or infinitesimal,” said Edward B. Foley, director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.