Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is prepared to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states, her campaign said on Wednesday. Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a $2m fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” favoring Vladimir Putin's candidate Donald Trump.
Her move came amid calls for recounts or audits of the election results by groups of academics and activists concerned that foreign hackers may have interfered with election systems. Trump won unexpected and narrow victories against Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and may yet win Michigan, where a result has not yet been declared.
“I’m interested in verifying the vote,” said Dr Barbara Simons, an adviser to the US election assistance commission and expert on electronic voting. “We need to have post-election ballot audits.” Simons is understood to have contributed analysis to the effort but declined to characterise the precise nature of her involvement.
Curiosity about Wisconsin has centred on apparently disproportionate wins that were racked up by Trump in counties using electronic voting compared with those that used only paper ballots. The apparent disparities were first widely publicised earlier this month by David Greenwald, a journalist for the Oregonian.
Jill Stein said she was acting due to ‘compelling evidence of voting anomalies’ in several battleground states
Dozens of professors specialising in cybersecurity, defense and elections have in the past two days signed an open letter to congressional leaders stating that they are “deeply troubled” by previous reports of foreign interference, and requesting swift action by lawmakers. “Our country needs a thorough, public congressional investigation into the role that foreign powers played in the months leading up to November,” the academics said in their letter, while noting they did not mean to “question the outcome” of the election itself.
Halderman, the University of Michigan computer security expert, noted that this Friday is the deadline for requesting a recount in Wisconsin, where Trump’s winning margin stands at 0.7%. In Pennsylvania, where his margin is 1.2%, the deadline falls on Monday. In Michigan, where the Trump lead is currently just 0.3%, the deadline is Wednesday 30 November.
Senior legislators including Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland have already called for deeper inquiries into the full extent of Russia’s interference with the election campaign.
Stein’s move would shield Democratic operatives and people who worked on Clinton’s bid for the White House overtly challenging the election. Several senior Democrats are said to be reluctant to suggest there were irregularities in the result because Clinton and her team criticised Trump so sharply during the campaign for claiming that the election would be “rigged” against him.
But others have spoken publicly, including the sister of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest aide. “A shift of just 55,000 Trump votes to Hillary in PA, MI & WI is all that is needed to win,” Hema Abedin said on Facebook, urging people to call the justice department to request an audit.
Alexandra Chalupa, a former Democratic National Committee consultant who during the campaign investigated links between Moscow and Trump’s then campaign manager Paul Manafort, is also participating in the attempt to secure recounts or audits.
“The person who received the most votes free from interference or tampering needs to be in the White House,” said Chalupa. “It may well be Donald Trump, but further due diligence is required to ensure that American democracy is not threatened.”
In a joint statement issued last month, the office of the director of national intelligence and the Department for Homeland Security said they were “confident” that the theft of emails from the DNC and from Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, which were published by WikiLeaks, was directed by the Russian government.
“Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company,” the statement went on. “However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian government.” |
