It may not be getting a lot of coverage in the media, but there’s a lot of activity going around the recounts of presidential votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In Michigan, a federal judge has ordered the recount to go forward.
A federal judge acting on a suit brought by Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has ordered Michigan officials to begin a recount of the votes in that state in last month's presidential election.
This trumps (so to speak) an objection by the Trump campaign that could have delayed the start of a recount and endangered the state’s ability to submit final results on time. Trump’s edge in Michigan is just 10,704 votes out of over 5 million cast—less than a quarter of one percent.
Meanwhile, the Green Party withdrawal of their challenge in Pennsylvania appears to be for reasons other than what was in their original announcement on Saturday, and they came up with a different direction on Saturday night.
… later Saturday night, the party announced it’ll go to federal court instead. A statement from the lead lawyer for the recount campaign says it’ll seek an emergency federal court order for the recount. It says barriers to a recount in Pennsylvania are pervasive and the state court system isn’t equipped to address them.
The real reason for pulling the plug in Pennsylvania in the first place wasn’t a lack of funds. It was a simple screw-up in the case as it was filed.
Though the Green Party said they were withdrawing because they couldn’t pay the million dollar bond due on Monday, that was a puzzling response considering what they had already raised and what they could have raised over the weekend. The real reason for withdrawing the original case seems to be that they made a simple procedural error.
In a Dec. 2 order, the campaign was told it would have to address concerns about the filing at a Monday hearing. Among the hurdles: whether the court could hear the case without affidavits from at least five voters specifically saying “the election was undue or illegal” and that the petition to contest it was “made in good faith.” In 1925, the state Supreme Court ruled that unless affidavits explicitly made those allegations — even if they were contained in the underlying complaint — the effort to contest the results was fatally flawed.
The Green Party’s submission? Fatally flawed. Similar procedural problems have killed a number of county and district-level efforts where the Green Party missed paperwork or failed to put in a $50 fee.
They had no choice but to drop out of Pennsylvania because the case they made would never have survived in court. The nature of the federal case to be made on Monday will likely involve issues that have never been recognized in the past as grounds for a recall, so it doesn’t represent the best hope—but it’s something. Stein has scheduled a rally for Monday morning outside Trump Tower.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin the recount is in progress but there would need to be more error than in previous elections to make a difference.
… with a full recount underway regardless, all eyes will be focused on Wisconsin for the next few weeks. We should expect three things: the recount will discover only small discrepancies between the election night totals; both methods of counting ballots — hand and scanners — will prove highly accurate; and scanners will be more accurate than humans.
The last recount in the state resulted in only a tiny change—literally a few dozen votes. So it’s very unlikely that there would be much difference in the vote totals unless there really was some tactic employed that would affect the electronic totals. On the other hand, any significant difference that does show up is going to be a good sign that something shady really did happen.
At the other end of the dial, a partial recount in Nevada is underway.
A recount of a sample of ballots has begun in Nevada, at the request of De La Fuente. Clinton won in Nevada, and De La Fuente finished last. But De La Fuente requested and paid about $14,000 last week for the recount, which he called a counterbalance to the review sought by Stein in Wisconsin.
Notice that Nevada’s Republican Governor Brian Sandoval and Republican Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt didn’t throw additional barriers in front of De La Fuente and didn’t inexplicably triple existing fees. So his costs in Nevada are trivial while the cost of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania keeps going up.