Recount to start Thursday; Stein request for hand tabulation denied

Jill Stein’s Green Party served notice that it would petition for a MI recount even as her party pushed forward with recount efforts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump won by somewhat wider but still small margins.

Stein has said that she was calling for the recount “because of the vulnerability of … voting systems and various indicators of concern”, though she admitted that she does not expect the outcome of the election to change.

Filing in Pennsylvania three days after she filed a similar request in Wisconsin, Stein’s campaign said she would file a similar request in MI by its deadline on Wednesday.

Despite winning a clear majority in the electoral college (which is how the President is chosen, ) Trump is more than 2 million votes behind Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.

A top lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that the campaign would participate in Stein’s recount efforts in Wisconsin, but that there was a lack of “actionable evidence” of any foul play.

The result sparked anger among thousands of Clinton supporters who staged mass protests across the country, and called for recounts.

Wisconsin Elections Commission Chairman Mark Thomsen vigorously defended Wisconsin’s election system, saying he was certain that president-elect Donald Trump would emerge as the victor after the recount. The recount showed Justice David Prosser defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes, just 312 votes less than the unofficial results showed. Friedrichs said it is possible the recount, of granted, would not begin until December.

Stein issued a statement Tuesday morning calling Wisconsin’s $3.5 million cost “exorbitant” but pledged to pay it.

GOP attorney Eric Doster said the recount may cost $10 to $12 million, the same as a statewide election. But the deadline for requesting a recount in New Hampshire has already passed and the margin of victory in Virginia was larger than what is necessary for a recount to occur, according to election officials in those states. The big deadline is December 19 when all of the states’ electors must meet to cast their Electoral College votes.

Stein and the America Delta Party’s Rocky De La Fuente filed for a recount in Wisconsin last week, alleging discrepancies in the number of ballots cast in certain counties.

Stark and other scientists have submitted an affidavit in the Stein Wisconsin recount case, in favor of a hand count. So 72 different county clerks and more than 1,800 municipal clerks have to decide how things are done in their locales and which ballots count.

Wisconsin’s recount is scheduled to start this weekend, pending approval from the Elections commission, and the deadline to file for recounts in Pennsylvania and MI are Monday and Wednesday, respectively.

Stein’s recount efforts in Pennsylvania will be significantly more hard than they were in Wisconsin.