Will the Presidential Vote Recount Go as Planned?

Even though Hillary Clinton may have lost the presidential election, she’s not quite off the public stage yet; Clinton is clinging for dear life to a political effort that will almost certainly wind up a failure, but has at least a chance of inflicting some misery on the incoming Donald Trump administration in terms of perceptions of legitimacy.

At the time of Clinton’s loss to Trump, prior to his victory speech, there were frantic conversations held between Trump’s campaign team, Clinton’s campaign team and President Barack Obama.

Reportedly, a handshake agreement was struck whereby new President-Elect Trump would agree to pardon Clinton for her email scandal (and perhaps other past scandals) in exchange for her unconditional acceptance of the election results and concession of her loss.

According to insiders, the deal was agreed to, and an out-of-sorts Clinton appeared for a short time the next day to give a brief statement conceding the race to Trump. The former First Lady was then not seen in public until seven days later, when she appeared at a Children’s Defense Fund event, looking like she had aged 15 years.

In the interim, it appears that either Clinton, her family or her donors behind the scenes have convinced her to rescind her concession as she’s now 100 percent behind efforts by Jill Stein of the Green Party to effect a vote recount in states where she lost enough electoral votes to swing the election to Trump.

If Clinton can reverse the results in just those states, she could reverse the election result itself and be declared the winner. However, it won’t be easy; in fact, it may very well be impossible. Along the way, though, she could end up dragging Trump through more mud politically.

The states in question — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — all have deadlines to file for vote recounts. The recounts must be paid for by the party ordering them, in this case, Jill Stein’s Green Party. Through a donation website, the Green Party generated over $7 million dollars for the recounts in just over 24 hours —more than double the money the party had raised all year for Jill Stein’s presidential campaign.

Much discussion on the web speculates that the person behind the $7 million in donations is deep-pocketed Democratic donor George Soros. The deadline for submitting recount requests in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin was Monday, November 28. Stein submitted her paperwork in time for both states.

However, for Pennsylvania, three notarized affidavits each from the state’s 9,163 precincts will be necessary to be submitted as well. It’s almost certain that Stein will not be able to submit these in the next two weeks, and so, in order to mandate a recount, a lawsuit would need to be filed — also by November 28 — which Mark Brewer, a former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party and Stein’s lawyer, has said he has submitted.

The deadline for submitting a recount request in Michigan was Wednesday, November 30—which Stein made. In all three states, there are other hurdles. Chief among them is the time it will take to do a second count of the votes. Recounts must be completed by December 13 in order for these states’ electoral votes to be added to the total.

If they aren’t counted, there could be a scenario whereby the Electoral College does not produce a 270-vote majority for either candidate. Under the rules of the U.S. Constitution, that means the election would be handed to the U.S. House of Representatives, which is currently controlled by the Republican Party.

They would be free to elect either Clinton or Trump, but realistically, given that Trump won his party’s primary election by an enormous margin and given that Trump will still likely have a majority of votes in the Electoral College, it’s extremely unlikely the House would vote in anyone but Trump for president.

However, even if Trump is elected in this manner, it makes him look bad due to the fact that not only did Trump not win the popular vote, but he will not have been voted in by the Electoral College either. In short, he’ll appear even more like an illegitimate president to many voting Americans.

If this is the scenario the Democrats are aiming for, it would be a parting last laugh for the Clintons as they depart from the nation’s political stage — one that won’t soon be forgotten, even if their party is in shambles.

However, the above actions are not the worst-case scenario. In the worst-case, Clinton somehow would be able to overturn the vote in all three states and become the winner of the contest. But it will be a very uphill battle, and not just for the above-cited reasons.

In Wisconsin, the margin of difference in votes is 22,177. In Michigan, it’s 10,704. And in Pennsylvania, it’s 70,638 — a huge number that has never even been close to being reversed in the history of American politics. In fact, in the last 15 years of state elections, only three reversals have occurred, despite recounts in 27 races.

Clinton’s camp has already assembled computer experts that have claimed that the candidate may have received fewer votes in counties that used computerized voting machines. But Clinton’s lawyer Marc Elias stated that “we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology.”

Another factor working against Clinton is that the 4,500-plus electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania are so old that they are essentially “unhackable” — the companies that made them are long out of business and their technology is so ancient they don’t even have connections to the Internet; each machine is supposedly the size of a washing machine.

On the negative side, none of the machines produces a paper audit trail of every vote; each machine would have to be verified manually.

Should these attempts to reverse the vote fail, for Clinton, there’s one last hope — that electors in the Electoral College could switch their vote from Trump to Clinton. In order to claim victory, Clinton would need 37 Republican-aligned electors to switch their votes to the opposing party.

So far, Clinton has six electors who have committed to altering their vote. It’s highly unlikely she would ever get to 37, despite some reports that a number of electors have received death threats.

To Donald Trump, these efforts are “a scam” and a waste of time; he denounced Clinton’s initiative, claiming that “nothing will change.” He’s probably right, but given the wealth of George Soros and the determination of the Clinton family, almost anything is possible, if unlikely. Is it surprising to anyone that the Democrats have chosen this path?


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