Trump to fill more vacancies; recount distraction looms

Stein has raised more than Dollars 6.5 million to pay for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and MI.

Trump aides on Sunday fanned out across political talk shows to cast cold water on the recount efforts.

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”.

“Nothing will change”, he tweeted earlier before going on to quote bits of her concession speech in which she told her supporters to accept that Trump was the next president.

Trump, meanwhile, charged the Clinton campaign with hypocrisy. That is not the way our democracy works. “So much time and money will be spent-same result!”

Trump’s tweets over the weekend have both criticized the calls for recounts in the three key industrial states he won, while simultaneously raising questions about the integrity of the vote nationwide.

“He’s been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when, for whatever reason, her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70-plus electoral votes that he beat her by, ” Conway said on CNN’s “State of the Union”. Green Party independent candidate Jill Stein has raised the funds needed to pay for the recounts.

Elections Commission Chair Mark Thomsen predicted the count would reassure voters Wisconsin has a fair system and the state isn’t “counting dead people’s votes”. He has also claimed “millions voted illegally” across the United States without providing evidence. Hillary Clinton would need about 55,000 votes to turn the election outcome in her favor.

On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Conway said Trump and President Barack Obama have had several conversations, including a recent one that lasted 45 minutes. “And there is a respect for the process”, Conway said.

Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s Democratic rival in the primary race and now a member of the Senate leadership, defended the recount. “I do not doubt the president-elect is going to win that vote”. Instead there are just unsubstantiated tweets from Gregg Phillips, who claims to be the founder of VoteStand, which describes itself as “America’s first online election fraud reporting app”.

The Stein campaign says more than 84,000 ballots cast in MI did not include a vote for president.

President-elect Donald Trump asserted that he would have won the United States popular vote were it not for “millions of illegal” ballots, while dramatically sharpening his criticism of a recount in Wisconsin, calling it “a waste of time”. Green Party officials filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday after reports of possible voting discrepancies in areas that used paper ballots versus those where electronic voting took place.

If Stein does succeed in getting a recount in Pennsylvania, it may resemble the one undertaken in 2004 in OH, initiated by the Green Party.

Trump now has 290 Electoral College votes according to the Associated Press, well more than the 270 he needs to win the presidency.