This year’s presidential election, apparently settled three weeks ago, took an unexpected turn when Green Party candidate Jill Stein announced Nov. 23 that she would seek a recount in three states, “to ensure election integrity” and “protect our democracy.”
Stein explained, “After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual email accounts are causing many Americans to wonder if our election results are reliable.”
We believe that Stein’s effort is misguided because she herself has said there is no concrete evidence of vote-tampering, and those who stand to gain the most by reversing the election — Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Obama administration — have discounted purported evidence of breaches caused by computer hacks or other outside forces. With the chance of changing the outcome all but nonexistent, the weeks-long recounts will be a reminder of the “painful presidential race” rather than furthering the effort of moving on and beginning the healing of a deeply divided America.
In the past week, Stein has raised nearly $6.5 million of her $7 million goal from private donors to pay for filing fees and the cost of lawyers to force recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, states in which Donald Trump defeated Clinton by margins of 1.2 percent or less.
Stein told CNN on Monday: “What we have are predictors that if tampering took place, it would be most likely to be discovered in the three states where we are looking.”
The Clinton campaign declined to initiate any recounts and signed on only after Stein began her fundraising. Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign, said Saturday that it would participate “to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.” This despite Elias explaining that in the weeks after the election the Clinton campaign did not uncover any “actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter voting technology.”
Meanwhile, Trump, president-elect by virtue of his 306-232 margin in the Electoral College, added his own bizarre twist by claiming widespread voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California, all won by Clinton — though he offered no substantiating evidence and did not suggest that the votes there or anywhere else be recounted. Instead, he tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College by a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
The administration of President Barack Obama offered no encouragement for a recount. Officials said in a statement Friday that security experts had not uncovered “any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day,” adding, “We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people.”
And in Pennsylvania, where Stein filed a lawsuit seeking a statewide recount, Democratic Secretary of State Pedro Cortes said there was no evidence of irregularities or cyberattacks on voting machines.
Amherst lawyer John Bonifaz is advising the coalition working with Stein to force the recounts. Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, has long argued that U.S. elections lack a “verifiable process” because there is no mandatory audit in most states, which means mistakes — intentional or otherwise — may go undiscovered. While that may be true, that is a process that should be in place before an election is held, rather than after the fact.
Bonifaz was lead counsel of a recount of the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio backed by the Green and Libertarian parties. That recount did not change the result, reducing the margin of George W. Bush’s victory over John Kerry by 318 votes, from the initial tally of 118,775 down to 118,457.
Pennsylvania (20), Michigan (16) and Wisconsin (10) together have 46 electoral votes, so it would take a reversal of Trump’s wins in all three states to give Clinton the presidency. Election experts say margins of victory as large as those in Pennsylvania (about 71,000 votes) and Wisconsin (22,460) have never been overturned by a recount.
There will be no practical change after the recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: the Electoral College will certify Trump as president, and Clinton will remain the winner of the popular vote. Donors of that $6.4 million would have been better served if the money had gone to environmental, social justice and human rights causes for which the Green Party has long been an ardent advocate.