Jill Stein sues Wisconsin after the state refuses to do a hand recount

Jill Stein sues Wisconsin after the state refuses to do a hand recount

Tré Goins-Phillips 6 hours




Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president, called on a judge Monday to force Wisconsin to do a hand recount of the nearly 3 million votes cast after the Badger State’s Elections Commission declined to do just that.
In a unanimous vote, the commission decided to move forward with a recount process that is slated to begin Thursday. However, they left it up to local officials to determine the best way to conduct the recount — either by hand or by using ballot tabulation machines.
That decision led Stein to quickly file a lawsuit in the Dane County Circuit Court, arguing hand counting is the only way to ensure the votes are totally accurate. In any event, more than 30 counties told the Elections Commission they plan to do a hand recount whether mandated by the judge or not, according to the Associated Press.
Stein’s Wisconsin recount request, and subsequent lawsuit, included an affidavit from professor J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. He argued a hand recount is the only way to determine whether a cyberattack impacted the results on Nov. 8 because the information stored in electronic voting machines could have been compromised.
Nevertheless, Mark Thomsen, chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is certain President-elect Donald Trump, who won the state over Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton by 22,170 votes, would still emerge victorious after the recount.
“We are confident in our popular vote count,” he said.
Based on estimates made by the counties and given to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the recount will cost $3.5 million, which is more than three times the cost the commission previously estimated and is more than half of the $7 million fundraising goal Stein set for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
The Wisconsin recount will require an examination of all ballots, poll lists and absentee applications as well as rejected absentee and provisional ballots.
The last recount that took place in the Badger State was for the state’s Supreme Court race in 2011. The recount determined Justice David Prosser bested challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes — only 312 votes fewer than the unofficial results showed.
That effort took more than a month and consisted of about half as many votes as the millions cast in Wisconsin this year.
The original vote tally shows Trump with 1,404,000 votes, Clinton with 1,381,823 votes, Stein with 31,000 votes and independent candidate Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente with 1,514 votes.
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2016/11/29/jill-stein-sues-wisconsin-after-the-state-refuses-to-do-a-hand-recount/