Trump calls recount effort by Clinton a ‘scam’

Jill Stein, Green Party candidate, now joined by Clinton, want the recount of votes in up to three battleground states, but Trump called the push fraudulent, and “sad”.

“Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “Nothing will change.”

He quoted from her concession speech — “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead” — and he concluded: “So much time and money will be spent – same result! Sad.”

The president-elect launched his Twitter offensive on Sunday. “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he tweeted in the afternoon before alleging in an evening tweet “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California”.

It’s been well-documented that illegals have voted in elections, and it remains quite possible that the establishment attempted to rig the election in favour of Clinton, but that the Democrats could not halt the landslide against them.

Trump ignored the brewing recount effort until it became known that Clinton would team up with Jill Stein.

Some pundits point out that the recount in Wisconsin, and the coming ones in Michigan and Pennsylvania will not change the outcomes in any of the states, as no recount ever changes thousands of votes. The American Thinker, a blogger, says the purpose is that the recounts, if done by hand, may take longer than the last day for completing the official counts in a state.

“If all 3 states miss the deadline, Trump is at 260, Hillary at 232 and no one hits 270.” But the result would eventually be the same as result from the Electoral College without the recounts.

Hillary’s effort, with the help of Stein, is mainly to make Trump seem illegitimate, in claiming that he could not win the popular vote, and neither could he win the Electoral College by failing to reach 270.

Wisconsin officials already admitted that it will be tough to finish the recount by the federally required deadline of December 13.

Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff says Clinton is also backing out of a deal worked out between the two presidential campaigns on how the loser would concede to the winner.

Reince Priebus told “Fox News Sunday” that Clinton’s team “cut a deal” with Trump’s team specifying that once The Associated Press called the race in favor of one candidate, the other would call within 15 minutes to concede.

He’s now questioning whether Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias is backing down from that deal by announcing Clinton will participate in a recount in Wisconsin .

Meanwhile one of Michigan’s 16 electors who will be called upon to cast a vote validating the election of Donald Trump in the Electoral College, has testified on video that he and others in the state are receiving “dozens and dozens of death threats” from Hillary Clinton supporters urging them to switch their votes to Clinton.

Michael Banerian, 22, told the Detroit News Thursday he has received loads of threatening emails from people telling him to vote for Democrat Clinton instead of the GOP victor he is pledged to support. Trump won Michigan’s popular vote and should be able to count on the 16 electoral votes in that state.

The Detroit News verified one message containing a death wish and another containing a death threat, in which the person told Banerian he would “put a bullet” in his mouth.

BuzzFeed reported Thursday that the #NotMyPresident Alliance, a national anti-Donald Trump protest group, has released the personal information of dozens of Electoral College members in states that voted Republican.

A spreadsheet distributed to supporters Wednesday included the electors’ personal phone numbers, addresses, religions, races, genders and candidate preference.

A senior Trump adviser called Clinton’s decision to join a recount effort “incredible”, noting that the president-elect has not ruled out pursuing a criminal investigation into his former Democratic rival.

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s “State of the Nation” that Trump has not ruled out a criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, even though Trump recently indicated he’d rather not do so.

If the president was selected by popular vote, then only densely population regions of the US would decide who would become president. The United States of America would be reduced to the United States of New York and California, with 48 other vassal states without an Electoral College.

During the final debate before the election between Clinton and Trump in Las Vegas, Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would honor the results of the election even if he lost.

Clinton then called Trump’s response “horrifying” because he said he would wait until the outcome to announce his decision.

Clinton tore into Trump, suggesting the he would not honour the ballot: “That’s not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”

She added, “I for one am appalled that somebody who is the nominee of one of our major two parties would take that kind of position.”

Clinton is now taking that exactly that position herself.