A recount may not change the election. We should have one anyway.
It might be a long-shot, but #NeverTrump America is hanging onto the hope something went wrong and Donald Trump didn’t actually win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Jill Stein, the presidential candidate for the Green Party, filed for a recount in Wisconsin yesterday and has been raising money to challenge the voter totals in the other states in the coming days.
In calling for a recount, Green party candidate Stein might be trying to atone for her sin of contributing to Trump’s win. Maybe, but there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical, as Daniel Politi over at Slate explains.
The amount she’s asking for keeps increasing. The amount of money needed for the recount has been suspiciously creeping upward since the fundraising drive was launched. At first, the goal was $2.5 million. Now it’s $7 million with no real explanation as to why the additional money is needed.
Stein doesn’t actually want to help Clinton. Stein clearly states that the effort is “not intended to help Hillary Clinton,” adding that “recounts are part of an election integrity movement to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the U.S. election system is.” After all, during the campaign, Stein made clear she didn’t prefer Clinton over Trump and has now said that the way Clinton has stayed out of the recount fray only shows the Democratic Party is corrupt.
Even so, it’s good elections officials will be taking a closer look at votes considering a group of election lawyers and data experts have been calling for a recount over concerns about the election being hacked. They admit it probably wasn’t, but it’s something that needs checking considering Russia’s interference in our election, voting anomalies, and the reality voting machines aren’t secure.
A lawyer for the Clinton campaign, Marc Elias, says the Clinton camp has been listening very closely to these concerns in a post published on Medium earlier today. Elias says the campaign does not believe any of the concerns have “resulted in evidence of manipulation of results,” but it will be participating in the recount effort.
Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides. If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.
Even if the tallies are right and Trump won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, we should still be very concerned about Russia’s interference in our elections.