Jill Stein drops Pennsylvania recount case

“The recount does not benefit one candidate over another”, Stein said Thursday in a statement.

However, a few hours later, Jonathan Abady, lead counsel to the Stein recount efforts issued this statement, indicating it will move to federal court instead.

When putting all the results together, that means the first day of the recount narrowed the gap between Clinton and Trump by just a single vote.

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.

Wisconsin election officials, including the Democratic chairman of the state Elections Commission, all said they expected Trump’s victory to stand.

The Green Party has sought recounts of the results from the November 8 election in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, in addition to MI.

Meanwhile, Stein sued the same elections officials, demanding that the recount proceed.

County after county rejected the idea in recent days of performing the kind of software examination that the Green Party’s lawyers and computer scientists who have long studied election systems say would be necessary to show whether hackers rigged the election in Pennsylvania.

Stein has also requested recounts in two other states Trump narrowly won, MI and Wisconsin. “Yet the Trump campaign’s cynical efforts to delay the recount and create unnecessary costs for taxpayers are shameful and outrageous”.

A court filing said Green Party voters could not afford the $1m (£785,000) bond ordered by the court by Monday. That sum may be adjusted upward once the recount is complete.

Stein and her allies have suggested that hackers may have downloaded state voter registration databases and filed bogus absentee ballots or tampered in some way with the electronic machines that register votes but they have not offered proof pointing to either theory.

The latest independent analysis by Cook Political Report on Friday said Clinton had 65,250,267 votes compared to Trump’s 62,686,000 votes, the UPI reported. That new estimate, they said, brought their fundraising goal up to $7 million.

“Given her tiny vote total, Stein does not and could not possibly allege a good faith belief that she may have won the state of MI”. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of at least 100 state voters who believe “that there is a legitimate and good faith basis to contest the Presidential Election in the Commonwealth”.

The federal filing comes after both Attorney General Bill Schuette and Trump filed separate motions in state court to prevent the recount from happening. He then added, “We must accept this result and then look to the future”. “A recount is the best way, and indeed the only way in 2016, to ensure public confidence that the results are accurate, authentic, and untainted by outside interference”. We are committed to this fight to protect the civil and voting rights of all Americans.