Jill Stein Attempts PA Vote Recount
Green Party candidate Jill Stein is attempting to initiate a recount of the presidential election results in three key states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. On Monday, Stein’s lawyers filed papers in the Commonwealth Court that referred to the election as “illegal” and suggested that the results of thus might be inaccurate, thanks to problems with electronic voting machines. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the suit stated that, “[p]etitioners have grave concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machines used in their districts.”
Green Party candidate Jill Stein is attempting to initiate a recount of the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, among two other states.
The recount petition Monday was filed by a coalition of 100 Pennsylvania voters, as the law requires, but Stein is driving the effort with crowdfunded dollars raised online in the past weeks. Her overall goal is to challenge election results in three states that were crucial to deciding the outcome of the presidential election. Hillary Clinton lost each of the three states by less than 100,000 votes apiece. In the Keystone State, Clinton lost by only 71,300 votes.
Stein has raised the money to legally fund a recount in Pennsylvania, but the Inquirer states that the fundraising was probably “the easy part.” Stein referred to the recount procedure in Pennsylvania as “especially complicated.” Unlike the other two states, where she can just file a direct request for a vote audit, options in Pennsylvania are not as clear-cut. First of all, Stein will have to provide evidence that election fraud was probable during the voting process. That’s unlikely, says Democratic Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, who claims that there was no evidence of election fraud. Stein would have to take another path, through which three voters in each of Pennsylvania’s 9,163 voting precincts turned in a notarized affidavit to the clerk of their election district. However, the deadline for a voter-initiated recount was November 21st. That leaves a lawsuit as the only viable option for a recount in Pennsylvania.
