Jill Stein speaking at the Green Party Presidential Candidate Town
Hall hosted by the Green Party of Arizona at the Mesa Public Library
in Mesa, Arizona. (
Gage
Skidmore/Flickr)
The recount effort by Green Party presidential candidate Jill
Stein in three crucial U.S. states came to an end on Monday, after
weeks of legal wrangling yielded only one electoral review in
Wisconsin.
A U.S. judge in Pennsylvania rejected Stein’s request for a recount
and an examination of that state’s voting machines for evidence of
hacking in the Nov. 8 election won by Republican Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin election officials said on Monday they had
completed their 10-day recount with only small changes to the vote
total.
Stein, who finished fourth in the election, challenged the results
in those two states as well as Michigan, where the state’s top court
on Friday denied Stein’s last-ditch appeal to keep a recount going.
All of those traditionally Democratic strongholds supported Trump
over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Even if all three recounts had taken place, they were always
unlikely to change the outcome.
Stein argued that the use in many Pennsylvania districts of
electronic voting machines with no paper trail left the system
vulnerable to hacking.
In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond in
Philadelphia said it “borders on the irrational” to suspect hacking
occurred in Pennsylvania. He also emphasized that the deadline to
certify the state’s electoral votes is Tuesday, making it impossible
to hold a recount in time.
While there is no evidence of large-scale voting machine hacking,
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia targeted
Clinton in a series of cyber attacks on Democratic Party groups.
Trump has questioned those reports.
In response to Diamond’s ruling, Stein said in a statement that
Pennsylvanians’ right to have their votes counted had been “stripped
from right under them.”
In Wisconsin, Trump’s margin over Clinton increased by 131 votes
to 22,748 from 22,617 following the recount, according to the state
elections commission.
“Based on the recount, they (voters) can have confidence that
Wisconsin’s election results accurately reflect the will of the
people, regardless of whether they are counted by hand or by
machine,” Wisconsin Elections Commission chair Mark Thomsen said in
a statement.
Trump won Pennsylvania by more than 44,000 votes and Michigan by
more than 10,000 votes, according to the latest figures.
Despite winning the national popular vote by more than 2 percent,
Clinton would have had to sweep those states to win the presidency
under the U.S. Electoral College system, which assigns electoral
votes state-by-state rather than by overall national totals.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Additional reporting by Timothy
McLaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Bill Trott and
Andrew Hay)
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/green-party-us-election-recount-bid-comes-to-a-close/