Clinton Campaign Announces It Will Participate in Jill Stein Initiated Recount in Wisconsin

‘We Intend to Participate in Order to Ensure the Process Proceeds in a Manner That Is Fair to All Sides’

The Hillary Clinton for America presidential campaign has just announced it will participate in the recount of the vote in three states initiated by the Jill Stein campaign. Stein has raised well over $5.5 million to fund her pledge to have the vote recounted in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and filed papers Friday afternoon in Wisconsin to do so. Federal law states any recounts must be completed by December 13, one week before the Electoral College meets.

“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves,” Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Erik Elias announced on Medium late Saturday morning, adding, “but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.”

Elias stressed that the Clinton campaign is “grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities,” and states that those investigations have “not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation of results.” 

He notes that “Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three states that together proved decisive in this presidential election and where the combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes.”

Clinton currently is beating Trump in the national popular vote by 2,228,232 votes. 

Elias says that “regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.”

One of the nation’s top election law experts has suggested the recount effort is, to use his words, “BS,” and others have called Stein’s fundraising campaign “very fishy.”

 

Image by Michael Davidson for Hillary for America via Flickr and a CC license