Hillary Clinton’s campaign will participate in the Wisconsin election recount effort started by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday after raising more than $5 million to fund recounts in three states. Her announcement on Wednesday that she would request recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—three swing states won by Donald Trump—followed a report that supporters and activists had urged the Clinton campaign to call for a recount.
“Over the last few days, officials in the Clinton campaign have received hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton,” Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “The concerns have arisen, in particular, with respect to 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.”
Elias said, since Election Day, the campaign has spent time reviewing election results for any evidence of interference, consulting lawyers and data scientists, who haven’t found evidence of hacking.
“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,” he wrote, adding that the Clinton campaign will also participate in recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan if Stein follows through with requests in those states.
“We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But 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.”
