From [HERE] and [HERE] Green Party officials filed Friday for a recount in Wisconsin, following reports of voting discrepancies, and were seeking a deeper investigation into the election results, which handed the state to Donald Trump two weeks ago. [MORE]
Wisconsin Green Party co-chairman George Martin said that they were seeking a "reconciliation of paper records" -- a request that would go one step further than a simple recount, spurring, he said, an investigation into the integrity of the state's voting system.
"This is a process, a first step to examine whether our electoral democracy is working," Martin said.
The announcement came as Green Party candidate Jill Stein's Thanksgiving fundraising blitz passed $5 million. The money is well beyond the $2 million mark the Green Party initially set, and Wisconsin party officials said that any additional money not used for the recount would be used to train Green Party candidates for local office. The goal as of Friday was to raise $7 million.
"We don't know, and we think the forensic computer experts have raised serious questions. What we do know is that this was a hack-riddled election, we saw hacks into voter databases, into party databases, into individual email accounts. We know that there were attempts made broadly on state voter databases and we know that we have an election system that relies a computer system that is wide open to hacks," Stein told CNN's John Berman Thursday. "It's extremely vulnerable, Americans deserve to have confidence in our vote."
Late Friday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Board said it had received the petition from Stein and the Green Party and "is preparing to move forward with a statewide recount of votes."
"We have assembled an internal team to direct the recount, we have been in close consultation with our county clerk partners, and have arranged for legal representation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice," Wisconsin Elections Board Administrator Michael Haas said. "We plan to hold a teleconference meeting for county clerks next week and anticipate the recount will begin late in the week after the Stein campaign has paid the recount fee, which we are still calculating."
Hacking experts alerted the Clinton campaign earlier this week it was possible, based on voter low turnouts in some counties with electronic voting, that voting systems might have been hacked. But nobody has presented any evidence yet that they were tampered with.
After a period of public silence about the results of the 2016 election, Clinton's top campaign lawyer said the campaign will play a role in the recount initiated Friday by Green Party candidate Jill Stein. It will follow the same approach in Michigan and Pennsylvania if the third-party hopeful pursues recounts in those states as she has indicated.
"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, 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," Marc Elias, Clinton's general counsel, wrote Saturday on Medium.
Based on Donald Trump's current standing in the Electoral College, Clinton would have to win all three states to overturn the election results.
Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer, said that participating in the recount was the right step to ensure a fair outcome for all sides. "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," wrote Elias. [MORE]