Despite an almost certain win for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is officially attempting to overturn the election results based on what it’s calling fraud in three key swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The total number of votes that Trump won by for all three of these states is roughly 103,500.
Clinton’s campaign is trying to accomplish this through the persuasion of third-party candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party to officially request recounts in these three states.
If, somehow, fraud or uncounted ballots were found that could overturn the election results in all three states, Clinton would be successful at snatching victory and fulfilling previous expectations predicted by nearly all mainstream media outlets that she would be elected president.
While it’s true that Clinton won the popular vote (the final tally may give her a margin roughly two million votes), her electoral difference is anything but a triumph. As it stands now, before any recounting, Clinton is expected to receive 233 electoral votes to Trump’s 305.
If electoral votes are overturned with Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, Wisconsin’s 10 and Pennsylvania’s 20, that would shift the total to a 279 to 259 advantage for Clinton.
It’s more than ironic that it was Clinton who had pressured Trump to say that he would unconditionally accept the results of the election prior to it happening. Now, the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak — it’s Clinton who’s not accepting the reported results.
In a written piece on the website Medium, Clinton’s counsel Marc Elias stated, “Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not [originally] planned to exercise this [recount] option ourselves.”
Despite Donald Trump’s recent pledge to not prosecute Clinton over her email scandal, Clinton declared through Elias that she’ll attempt to go through with a recount plan via the Green Party’s Jill Stein.
Stein, who had previously been extremely outspoken in painting Clinton as a “hawk” who would bring the U.S. to the brink of “nuclear war” with Russia if she were elected, appears now to be changing her tune, likely persuaded by the sweet sound of money pouring into her camp’s coffers to fund her recount efforts.
By last count, Stein was on track to collect $7 million to verify the vote in the three states, the cost of which is just $2.5 million. The rest of that money will apparently sit in the Green Party’s bank account. Could that have anything to do with Stein’s motivations?
For her part, Stein insists that her efforts have nothing to do with fundraising and are merely attempts to insure “vote integrity” throughout the country (in most states, Stein got less than 2 percent of the vote and stands to gain nothing victory-wise through a recount).
In a statement on her campaign website, Stein said, “These recounts are part of an election integrity movement to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the U.S. election system is.”
What Stein left unmentioned is that her campaign doesn’t immediately wish to effect recounts in states where Clinton won by even smaller vote margins than these three states, which Trump won by a larger margin in total than the votes recovered by any previous recount effort in U.S. history.
Some reports on the web have said that the electronic donations to Stein for her recount actions flowed in intervals that were precisely timed; that is to say that they appeared to have been automated. Others noted that donations flowed in throughout the night when much of the U.S. was sleeping, making it look highly doubtful that these funds came from individuals.
Note that Stein only raised roughly three million dollars total for her entire campaign over a period of many months; for her to raise $7 million in a few days is nothing short of extraordinary (not to mention highly suspect).
Of the three states, Wisconsin had the second-smallest vote difference, with Trump edging Clinton out by 22,177 votes. Stein has submitted her request for a recount before the deadline to do so, and the state must finish its new count by December 13. Wisconsin used a combination of paper ballots and electronic voting machines to record the vote.
In Michigan, the margin of Trump’s victory is a mere 10,704 votes. The deadline for submitting a recount request for the state is November 30. Michigan used exclusively paper ballots for its voting, so discovering major vote fraud there would be highly unlikely.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s margin of victory is a relatively large 70,638 votes. Of the three key states, this would be the most difficult one to overturn. No single state recount has ever discovered nearly as many faulty votes as this.
Even if Stein manages to uncover “fraud,” irregularities or any other mischief in Wisconsin or Michigan, it is Pennsylvania that will be the hardest margin to overcome if Team Clinton is determined to grab victory back from Camp Trump. The deadline for filing for a recount is November 28.
The bad news for Trump supporters is that a majority of the machines used in the state were electronic, and they don’t have paper ballot backups. The good news, however, is that these 4,500-odd voting machines were not connected to the Internet (many are so old they’re the size of washing machines), so if there was fraud, it couldn’t have been committed from a central location.
Indeed, all of the machines would have had to have been hacked individually — a process that would have taken one person at least four months to execute. On the other hand, there were reports on Election Day of some machines in Pennsylvania switching Trump votes to Clinton.
It should be mentioned that none of these three states had voted Republican since the 1980s, a fact that the Clinton camp will certainly try to use to make their case. It should also be mentioned that Stein wants to eventually recount votes in other states as well, but for now, it’s focusing on these first three states in a blatant attempt to overturn the winner of the election.
Notably, before the vote, Trump had repeatedly warned that the election was likely going to be “rigged,” and some election fraud experts such as Black Box Voting’s Beverly Harris have even claimed that Clinton had manipulated enough of the results to “steal” as many as five states on Election Day — and she still lost.
Furthermore, some of those same experts speculate that Trump may have actually won the popular vote — not lost it — by as many as seven million votes. They say that three million votes should have been excluded because they were cast by illegal immigrants and another four million were cast by real voters using dead people’s names and IDs.
The first number is more likely than the second, but even discounting the deceased people, that would still be a million-plus-person advantage for Trump in the popular vote — enough to shout down liberal naysayers who believe they hold the high moral ground because more people in New York and California voted for Clinton.
It will be interesting to see how this affair plays out. But Conservatives should be on their guard for a steal attempt. All three of the above states are crucial in the battle for the presidency, and the Clintons are not known for giving up easily.
~American Liberty Report
