It's Official: Donald Trump Wins Michigan; President-Elect Could Fight Recount

Updated. President-elect Donald Trump, who was certified Monday as the winner of Michigan's 16 electoral votes, could contest a request for a recount of Michigan's nearly 4.8 million votes in the Nov. 8 general election. If he does, he could stretch the latest drama in a stunning election cycle well into December and close to the Electoral College vote.

In the results certified by the Michigan Board of Canvassers, Trump led Michigan by 10,704 votes — 2,279,543 compared with 2,268,839 for Clinton, or 47.6 percent to 47.4 percent. Trump is the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the state since George H.W. Bush won it in 1988.

Trump hasn't said that he will take the step of contesting the recount, but he has been critical of the effort by Green Party candidate Jill Stein to force recounts of votes in three battleground states that swung the election in his favor — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

But he would have seven days to contest a request for a recount after it is filed, the Detroit Free Press reported. Such a request would have to be filed with the Michigan Secretary of State, and if the agency's Board of State Canvassers dismissed it, the recount would begin the following day.

"If the objections are overturned by the board, the recount can commence after the second business day following the issuance of the board’s decision," Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams told the Detroit Free Press.

Trump's Michigan campaign director, Scott Hagerstrom, told the Free Press he couldn't speculate on how the campaign might respond until a recount is actually requested but said "all options will be open and pursued," "but it’s hard to speculate until a recount is requested."

“We just have to wait and see,” Hagerstrom said.

Our earlier update: Green Party candidate Jill Stein has hired a former state Democratic Party chairman as her attorney in a request for a recount of Michigan’s votes in the Nov. 8 presidential election. Mark Brewer led the party from 1995-2013 and is an attorney with the Goodman Acker law firm in Southfield.

Michigan’s votes will be certified at 2 p.m. Monday. Only 10,704 votes separate President-elect Donald Trump, who won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes in the still unofficial results, and Hillary Clinton.

Election lawyer John Bonifaz, who has been advising the recount effort, has raised questions about 85,000 ballots with “blank votes” in the presidential race — more than enough to make up for the difference separating Trump and Clinton.

Stein has said that is a “sky-high number of votes,” The Detroit News reported.

Once the results are certified, Stein has 48 hours to request and pay for the recount of the 4.8 million votes. Rick Lass, director of recounts for Stein’s campaign, told The Detroit News the Stein campaign will make the looming deadline.

Patch's original report: A recount of votes cast in the Nov. 8 presidential election is underway in Wisconsin, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who requested it after a University of Michigan election security expert and election lawyers raised hacking fears in three swing states that decided the election, has promised to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.

President-elect Donald J. Trump, who won the three states by razor-thin margins, has decried the recount effort as “a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.”

And on Sunday, Trump brought back vestiges of his “rigged election” claims during the campaign in a series of tweets that declared he had won both the electoral and popular votes, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegal.” Democrat Clinton is up more than 2 million votes over Trump in the popular vote but trails in the all-important Electoral College, 232 to 290 (Michigan’s 16 electoral votes would boost Trump’s total 306 votes).

Trump also claimed “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, New Hampshire and California — states that Clinton won — but said the media are ignoring it. While claiming massive voter fraud in an election that he won, Trump tweeted excerpts from the former secretary of state’s concession speech, as well as Clinton’s answer to a debate question in which she criticized Trump for not directly answering whether he would accept the results of the election.

Clinton’s campaign had been silent on the recount issue until Saturday night, when officials said the campaign would participate in the Wisconsin recount to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides, despite the absence of any “actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology.”

• SEE ALSO: Swing State Hacking Fears Fuel Talk of Recount

Likewise, neither election experts nor Trump have proof that the election was rigged in any state, and U-M computer science professor J. Alex Halderman, who set off a firestorm with a hypothesis that the 2016 presidential election could have been hacked, attempted to clear the air in a blog post. In it, he wrote that the election was “probably not” hacked, but the only way to know for sure is to immediately audit the results.

Political analysts and pundits have dismissed suggestions about hacking, arguing that Democrat Hillary Clinton lost because she got fewer votes where it counted. Even if the election had been hacked, a recount might not reveal it, they've said.

Michigan Anomalies Noted

In their hypothesis that the election could have been hacked, Halderman, National Voting Rights Institute founder John Bonifaz and their colleagues cited what appeared to be an anomaly in Wisconsin: Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that used electronic-voting machines when compared with those that used optical scanners and paper ballots. According to their analysis, Clinton could have been shorted about 30,000 votes, enough to turn the state blue.

Though different, the situation in Michigan also raises questions, Bonifaz told Newsweek.

“In Michigan, Trump won by 11,000 votes. But there were 85,000 ‘blank votes’ in which people voted for other races but they left the presidential race blank. That is far higher than any election in history. A hand count of the ballots could determine if the box was merely checked, but the oval not filled in. If so, it will be counted. This can make a difference in the outcome.”

In a blog post on Medium announcing the Clinton campaign would participate in the recount, campaign lawyer Marc Elias said there’s another potential problem in Michigan.

“... Wisconsin and Pennsylvania conduct post-election audits using a sampling of precincts,” he wrote. “Michigan and many other states still do not. This is unfortunate; it is our strong belief that, in addition to an election canvass, every state should do this basic audit to ensure accuracy and public confidence in the election."

Trump Campaign Seeking Observers

In preparation for a recount, both Michigan’s Democratic and Republican parties, as well as the Trump campaign, were seeking volunteers to observe the hand-count of the nearly 4.8 million votes cast in the election. Michigan still hasn’t officially been called, but Trump holds a lead of 10,704 votes over Clinton. Michigan results are expected to be certified at 2 p.m. Monday by the state’s Board of Canvassers.

Stein, who has said she doesn’t like either Trump or Clinton but is requesting the recounts to ensure election integrity and security, has until Wednesday to request a recount in Michigan. She has raised more than $6 million of a $7 million goal to pay for the recounts and legal costs likely to be incurred in the process. In Michigan, the cost is $125 for each of the state’s 6,300 precincts, or $787,500.

In a statement, Michigan GOP chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said state party officials have been in touch with the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign and are “prepared to recruit volunteers, train them, and monitor all recount efforts to ensure that it is done in a fair and legal way.”

“We are confident that the results will uphold what Michigan voters decided on Election Day: Donald Trump won Michigan and is the president-elect of the United States,” McDaniel said.

Scott Hagerstrom, director of Trump’s campaign in Michigan, also asked supporters to help by observing recounts across the state.

“We know that many on the progressive left will continue to work to discredit this election and reverse it, if possible,” Hagerstrom wrote in an email to supporters. “A recount where we look the other way and do not participate, is their only chance. We stand ready to make sure every vote is counted properly.”

The deadline for a recount in Pennsylvania is Monday. The request is slightly more complicated there, because rather than a direct request for a recount, as happened in Wisconsin, voters must petition their county precincts. The Stein camp told Newsweek that a number of Pennsylvania voters will be making those requests Monday.

What If States Flip to Clinton?

Together, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin control 46 electoral votes. If the states flipped to Clinton, she would likely win the 2016 presidential election — likely, because in 22 states, electors aren’t obligated to vote for the winning candidate.

But before the Electoral College can vote, the recounts have to be completed, Recounting will require a herculean effort, and simply using the same methods employed when the votes were tallied on Election Night won’t suffice, Bonifaz, who has been advising the recount effort, told Newsweek.

“If officials say we are just going to push the button on the machines again, that will not be sufficient,” he said. “If you don’t take representative samples and match the paper ballots to the machines, the paper ballots aren’t worth a grain of salt.”

The matter might not be settled by Dec. 19, when the Electoral College votes, Bonifaz said:

“If the tallies of the recount differ from the results on election night, the state must go with the tallies from the recount. If discrepancies are shown, it will open the door to further investigation. There will have be a forensic examination of machines. There will be likely litigation.”

And there’s another issue: What happens if the vote counts are still going on when the Electoral College is scheduled to vote, as occurred in 2000, the last time a candidate, Democrat Al Gore, won the popular vote but didn’t win the electoral vote?

“It’s anybody’s guess what will happen,” Bonifaz told Newsweek. “... I think we would argue that we should keep counting.”

“Moral Electors” Hail Mary Campaign

Even before the hacking concerns were raised, some electors in states Trump won were feeling pressured to change their votes, USA Today reported. Michigan and Wisconsin both require electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in their states.

“Faithless electors,” as those who vote for a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in their states are known, have never changed the outcome of an election, and they’re not likely to this year. For one thing, electors are entrenched in their parties, and voting against the winning candidate would endanger their political futures. History isn’t on their side, either. There have been only 157 faithless voters in the history of the Electoral College, 71 of them because the candidate died before electors voted, according to Fairvote.org. The other 82 electors changed their votes for personal reasons.

By Monday morning, more than 4.65 million people had signed a Change.org petition urging the 149 electors scheduled to meet Dec. 19 to ignore their states’ votes and vote for Clinton, who won the popular vote, and arguing that Trump is “unfit to serve” because of “his scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.”

Clinton’s large lead in the popular vote — the widest gap in the four times that the Electoral College and popular votes went in opposite directions — and Trump’s perceived deficits and weaknesses have fueled other efforts to convince electors to vote for Clinton.

Two Clinton electors in Washington and Colorado are mounting an effort they’ve called “Moral Electors” to convince their peers to vote their conscience.

“This is a long shot. It’s a Hail Mary,” P. Bret Chiafalo, of Everett, Washington, told Politico. “However, I do see situations where — when we’ve already had two or three (Republican) electors state publicly they didn’t want to vote for Trump. How many of them have real issues with Donald Trump in private?”

Sharon Geise, an elector from Mesa, Arizona, told USA Today that she has received 8,000 emails from people urging her to change her vote. She said Clinton needs to put a stop to the campaign. “It’s bizarre,” Geise said. “I don’t dare answer my phone.”

Photos by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons