Hillary and Jill Stein band together for recount

No evidence of any tampering has been found, but the Stein campaign argues they have to dispell concerns about irregularities.

“This is not being done to benefit one candidate at the expense of the other,” Stein told PBS. But this may not be the case as is Stein only fundraising to conduct recounts in states where Trump won.

Hillary won New Hampshire, Minnesota and Nevada by fewer votes than Trump won Pennsylvania, but there will be no recount in any of those three states.

While Trump won Pennsylvania by around 78 000 votes, Clinton won New Hampshire by less than 3 000 votes. Hillary won Minnesota by less than 44 000 votes and Nevada by around 26 000 votes.

If this was a fair and impartial effort to recount closely fought swing states, at least one of the recounts should be taking place in a state where Hillary won, but that isn’t the case.

Stein’s recount effort only began after computer scientists claiming anomalies between the electronic voting machine results and the paper ballot results met with the Clinton campaign and asserted that the vote may have been “hacked”. The explanation beggers belief in the case of Michigan, which made no use of electronic voting machines.

“We are an entire paper and optical scan state,” Chris Thomas, the longtime director of Michigan’s Bureau of Elections, told the Detroit Free Press. “Nothing is connected to the Internet.” The voting could therefore not have been hacked as Stein claims.

The vote has already been counted twice in Michigan. A quick count was conducted and the results announced on the morning of November 9th. A second certified count was then conducted, with the final results announced yesterday, with Trump winning by 10 704.

If a third vote count in Michigan, which only uses paper ballots, was to flip the state to Hillary, this would obviously suggest vote fraud not with regard to the original vote, but the recount itself.

Trump called Stein’s attempt “a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded”.

Rumours are swirling as to how Stein managed to raise such a large sum of money, now over $4.7 million dollars, in such a short space of time given that she only raised around $3 million dollars for her entire campaign.

Suspicions over the regularity and timing of the donations have also led some claims that George Soros is funding the effort.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign members plan to participate in the recount of ballots in three states, an attorney for the Democratic presidential candidate confirmed to the Wall Street Journal.

On Saturday the Obama administration declared however the elections were “free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective”.