Why Is Trump Fighting So Hard to Stop the Recount in MI?

Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who garnered only about 1 per cent of the vote, has said the recount campaign is not targeted at Mr Trump or Mrs Clinton.

Green Party candidate for President Dr Jill Stein has been pushing for a recount in major states, a move that has been backed by Hillary Clinton.

Stein has said the goal of a recount is to ensure “our votes are safe and secure”, considering hackers’ probing of election targets in other states and hackers’ accessing of the emails of the Democratic National Committee and several Clinton staffers.

An updated count Friday by state election officials shows Trump’s lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton has shrunk to 49,000, from 71,000. The suit contends that the recount threatens the due process rights of Johnson and others who voted for Trump.

Speed is important to all sides, as the federal deadline for states to complete their recounts is December 13, ahead of the state electors convening on December 19th to cast their Electoral College votes.

Donald Trump tried to get the recounts stopped in Wisconsin and MI, and he has failed in both states. Clinton lost to Trump in Wisconsin by about 22,000 votes, or less than one percentage point.

Stein is also fighting efforts to halt the recount in Wisconsin as well, where Trump supporters have also tried to stop the recount in progress there. Further, Pennsylvania law does not allow a court-ordered recount, they say. A court hearing on the recount request will take place Monday.

She went to on to say that even if the recounts carry on, it will not have an impact on the election result.

Attorney General Bill Schuette filed a similar challenge in the courts Friday morning prior to the Board of State Canvassers meeting.

“America’s voting machines and optical scanners are prone to errors and susceptible to outside manipulation”, said J. Alex Halderman, one of the nation’s leading cyber security experts and a professor of computer science at the University of MI who filed court papers supporting a recount.

Ballots are stacked up behind a door as a statewide presidential election recount begins Thursday, Dec. 1, 2016, in Milwaukee.

The recount of almost 3 million ballots already kicked off in Wisconsin, and auditors are rushing to meet the December 13 deadline. WEC Chairman Mark Thomsen said he anticipates the recount to uphold Trump’s original victory.

Blocking the recount, he wrote, would also “very likely prevent defendants from completing the recount by the deadline”.

Judge James Peterson late Friday denied a request from President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters seeking an immediate, temporary halt to the state’s presidential election recount while a lawsuit they filed to stop the recount moves through federal court.

The Wisconsin recount doesn’t carry almost the same drama as the Florida recount in 2000, when the outcome of the presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush hung in the balance.