Jill Stein 'Escalates' Statewide PA Recount Case, Prepares For Federal Court Fight

Updated. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, contrary to reports saying she's dropping her recount effort in Pennsylvania, said she actually plans to escalate efforts in Pennsylvania by filing in federal court Monday to force a statewide recount.

Jonathan Abady, lead counsel to the Stein recount efforts, said the Stein campaign "will continue to fight for a statewide recount in Pennsylvania."

"We are committed to this fight to protect the civil and voting rights of all Americans," he said in a statement. "Over the past several days, it has become clear that the barriers to verifying the vote in Pennsylvania are so pervasive and that the state court system is so ill-equipped to address this problem that we must seek federal court intervention.

"As a result, on Monday the Stein campaign will escalate our campaign in Pennsylvania and file for emergency relief in federal court, demanding a statewide recount on constitutional grounds.”

Stein's campaign intends to continue its county-by-county recount effort in Pennsylvania, which requires efforts in individual precincts and requires three voters to successfully petition their local election boards.

Indeed, an official recount of 75 Philadelphia voting divisions began Friday afternoon, and Trump's statewide lead dropped by about 30,000 votes after some discrepancies were revealed in Pennsylvania, shrinking his margin from 1.1 percent to 0.8 percent. A margin of 0.5 would trigger an automatic statewide recount.

Updated. Green Park Presidential Jill Stein dropped a court petition to force a statewide Pennsylvania recount, although some recount efforts are apparently continuing.

Stein's attorney, Lawrence Otter, said in a court filing that that voters cannot afford to post a $1 million bond to continue the statewide recount effort.

Stein's campaign, however, intends to continue its county-by-county recount effort in Pennsylvania, which requires efforts in individual precincts and requires three voters to successfully petition their local election boards.

Indeed, an official recount of 75 Philadelphia voting divisions began Friday afternoon, and Trump's statewide lead dropped by about 30,000 votes after some discrepancies were revealed in Pennsylvania, shrinking his margin from 1.1 percent to 0.8 percent. A margin of 0.5 would trigger an automatic statewide recount.

Updated. Supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump have filed legal challenges in Pennsylvania to stop the presidential election recount efforts in the state. The supporters also have filed challenges in Michigan and Wisconsin.

Trump supporters said the recounts will cost millions and potentially cost voters their voice in the Electoral College, according to The New York Times.

Lawyers for Trump and his allies are seeking to halt legal proceedings by Jill Stein to contest the statewide election results in Pennsylvania. Lawrence J. Tabas, general counsel of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times that Stein’s lawyers had fallen short of demonstrating that there was fraud or illegal action in the Nov. 8 election.

Updated. Philadelphia officials have agreed to recount some ballots, but they rejected a "forensic audit," which would examine whether the machines were maligned in anyway on Election Day.

Philadelphia on Friday will recount ballots in 75 divisions across the city, according to Republican Party officials. Lawrence Tabas, a general counsel for the Pennsylvania Republican Party, argues that the time to review the machine was before the election - not after.

In Bucks County, meanwhile, a judge will hear arguments Tuesday whether to grant a recount of votes cast in 24 of the county's 304 precincts, officials said.

Updated. Gov. Tom Wolf says he doesn’t think there can be a total state recount in Pennsylvania, noting that at least six counties - Lehigh, Berks, Bucks, Centre, Montgomery and Philadelphia - have received petitions.

On Wednesday, a Montgomery County judge rejected requests for recounts of presidential election results in 78 precincts. Judge Bernard Moore gave no reason for the decision. A possible appeal was uncertain at press time.

The Morning Call described the Lehigh County scene on Wednesday:

Original story. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has officially petitioned the Pennsylvania courts on behalf of 100 of the state's voters to launch a recount of the presidential election.

Stein made the announcement after saying she was seeking three voters in each Pennsylvania election district who were willing to submit an affidavit, each requesting a recount, to their county board of elections. The petition calls the election "illegal."

"We will be working with our legal team to develop the affidavit language to send to those willing to do so," she said on her website.

Stein said her effort, which will be supported by Hillary Clinton's defeated presidential campaign, needs volunteers to observe the recount in every county in Pennsylvania, noting that the state has more difficult rules than other states.

"In Pennsylvania, it's especially complicated," she said in a video. "Pennsylvania is the only state in which the recount process has to be initiated by actually thousands of voters."

Here is the video:

Stein also is raising enough money to follow through on her vow to request a recount of votes in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — three states that swung the 2016 presidential election to Donald J. Trump by razor-thin margins.

The Pennsylvania deadline varies from district to district, Stein says in her video. The deadline could be Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the district. In some - but not many - districts, she said, the deadline has already passed.

Trump may have given the recount effort an unintentional boost with his own words on Twitter this weekend:

The Pennsylvania Republican Party, however, called into question the motives behind Stein's efforts and took Clinton's campaign to task for joining the efforts.

Pennylvania GOP Chairman Rob Gleason, in a release, said Stein has decided to "launch baseless attacks against the integrity of Pennsylvania’s election system," adding that "it’s sad to see a major candidate such as Hillary Clinton plunge our electoral system into an unnecessary controversy just because she didn’t win."

"It is far past time for the Commonwealth and the nation to move past the Clinton era as we work together to make America great again," he said.

As of Monday afternoon, Stein met her first goal of raising $2 million, saying she has enough money to request a recount in Wisconsin. She has upped her goal to $7 million - she has raised more than $5 million thus far - to help fund recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan. She is taking request for donations on her site: https://jillstein.nationbuilde...

Stein followed through on the recount effort after a group of respected computer scientists and election lawyers said they have "persuasive evidence" that election results may have been hacked, potentially denying Democrat Hillary Clinton of tens of thousands of votes.

Stein received a negligible smattering of votes in the three states but said in a statement that she will file for a recount in an “effort to check the accuracy of the machine-counted vote tallies.”

"The use of systems that have been demonstrated to be easily hacked should concern every American," the statement said.

Stein's request for a recount takes pressure off Clinton to jump back into the political fray, a gambit that could backfire and further divide Americans after a particularly invective-filled election. Political analysts and experts are skeptical that the elections were hacked despite widespread speculation in recent months of a Russian cyberattack to meddle with U.S. election results.

Together, the three swing state control 46 electoral votes that could swing the election back to Clinton, who was favored to win in pre-election polls. Requests for recounts must be filed by Friday in Wisconsin, Monday in Pennsylvania and Wednesday, Nov. 30, in Michigan.

Claiming to have uncovered “persuasive evidence” that suggests election results were hacked in three big battleground states that swung the 2016 presidential election to Trump, a prominent group of election attorneys and computer scientists are pressing Clinton to ask for a recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

If they’re right, more history would be made in an already history-making election. The former secretary of state would become the nation’s first woman president, and Trump wouldn’t make history as the first person in modern times to win the presidency without having served in elected or public office or the military. He would also become the first candidate to win the first tally of electoral votes only to have the victory reversed in a recount.

New York Magazine reported Tuesday that the group, which includes J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, and voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz, hasn’t spoken publicly about what it found.

The group is said to be lobbying Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and general counselor Marc Elias to make the case for a recount in the three swing states, which together control 46 electoral votes. If the Clinton campaign decides the gambit is worth it, it doesn't have much time; the former secretary of state would have file for a recount by Friday in Wisconsin, Monday in Pennsylvania and Wednesday, Nov. 30, in Michigan.

According to the New York Magazine source, the computer scientists and attorneys cited as evidence supporting a recount: 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.

Halderman wrote on the website The Medium that he's not entirely convinced that an audit would change the results of the election but one should be done anyway:

Currently, Clinton is about 2 million votes ahead of Trump in the popular vote but trails Trump, 232 to 306, in all-important electoral votes. If Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (16 electoral votes) and Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) flipped in a recount, Clinton would win in the electoral count, 278-260.

Michigan’s votes were still outstanding until Tuesday, when counties submitted their final results. Trump was still the winner but by a less than 1 percent margin of 9,528 votes. According to the Cook Political Report, a Washington-based newsletter, Trump won by slightly more than 1 percent in Wisconsin (27,190 vote difference) and Pennsylvania (68,965 vote difference).

Russian Hacking Allegations

In a normal year, the differences might not merit an independent review, but this has been far from a normal election cycle. The Obama White House has accused the Russian government of deploying its hackers to meddle with and manipulate the outcome of the U.S. election with ongoing cyberattacks that roiled the Democratic National Committee and cast suspicion on the integrity of the electoral process.

The report from the analysts comes on the heels of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s call on Congress to investigate whether allegations of a Russian cyberattack are true.

“We cannot sit on the sidelines as a party and let allegations against a foreign government interfering in our election process go unanswered because it may have been beneficial to our cause,” Graham said.

The evidence for a recount is circumstantial, and there’s nothing that suggests the results were hacked. And there are plenty of skeptics.

Among them is Michigan's director of elections, who said it's not possible to hack Michigan voting machines because they're not connected to the internet.

“We are an entire paper and optical scan state,” Chris Thomas, director of the Michigan Bureau of Elections. told the Detroit Free Press Wednesday. “Nothing is connected to the Internet."

Data analysts Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Cohn of The New York Times immediately rejected the notion the results had been hacked. And election officials spent weeks reassuring voters how difficult it is to manipulate election results in response to Trump's blistering “rigged election” claims — which, incidentally, disappeared almost entirely when pre-election polls swung in his favor.

Washington Post political writer Philip Bump wrote Wednesday after the New York story began circulating that “a small margin in unlikely places is precisely the sort of thing that raises eyebrows, and these small margins did,” especially when coupled with suggestions of Russian involvement. But, he questioned, why would hackers target a state where pre-election polls showed Clinton up by 6 points, as she was in Wisconsin?

Clinton lost, Bump concluded, “because she got fewer votes where it counted.”

“That was a surprise, and surprises can be awfully hard to accept.”

What’s Not at Issue is Halderman’s Credibility

But no one seems to be doubting Hadlerman's credibility. He's widely respected and has famously demonstrated flaws in voting technologies before, including both domestically in Washington, D.C., and abroad in Estonia and Australia, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal News.

It took Halderman and a team of his students less than 24 hours to hack into the pilot internet voting system in the nation’s capital and alter votes and spy on voters.

“Halderman is very credible, and if he says there are anomalies that deserve investigation, they should be investigated,” Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, wrote on his Election Law Blog.

Ballot hacking is a complicated issue, Halderman told the Center for Investigative Reporting.

“This is more complicated than attacking an online voting system that is directly connected to the internet,” he said. “But it’s within the capabilities of nation-state attackers, and it would not require a large conspiracy.”

Voting machines don't even need to be hooked up to the internet to be hacked, Halderman explained.

“...Their software can potentially be attacked through a stuxnet-style attack that spreads via the memory cards that are used to load the ballot design,” he said.

Although it’s unclear whether Clinton will ask for a recall, some of her allies are suggesting it on social media. Heba Abedin, sister to top Clinton adviser Huma Abedin, encouraged her Facebook followers to lobby the Department of Justice to take a second look at the Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania results.

“A shift of just 55,000 Trump votes to Hillary in PA, MI & WI is all that is Needed to Win,” she wrote.

Reporting by Beth Dalbey and Tom Davis (Patch Staff)

Photo: Wikimedia Commons: An election worker closely examines a Florida punch card ballot from the 2000 US Presidential election for signs of a hanging chad. Unknown -

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons

Photo: Jill Stein, YouTube