Jill Stein, Green Party - RECOUNT !!!

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Jill Stein seeks voting Recount





Washington (CNN) Green Party nominee Jill Stein launched a bid Wednesday to seek a vote recount in three key Rust Belt states as pressure builds among liberals to challenge election results.

The Stein campaign said it needed to raise over $2 million by Friday to pay for recounts. That goal was reached by early Thursday morning, and the campaign has now increased the target to $4.5 million.

"Over the last 48-72 hours, reports have come in from experts, cyberexperts, who are reporting to us some very troubling news about the possibility of security breaches in voting results across this country," Stein campaign manager David Cobb said in a video posted to Stein's Facebook page Wednesday afternoon.

Stein and others are seeking an audit and recount of the November 8 voting results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, following reports that voting security experts alerted Hillary Clinton's campaign to the possibility of hacks in key counties in those states.

President-elect Donald Trump claimed Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- wins that helped push him comfortably over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory -- while Michigan remains too close to call, more than two weeks after Election Day.

While the loss of those states played a large part in Clinton's downfall, her lead in the popular vote has continued to grow. She now has close to 2 million more votes than Trump -- and pressure has been mounting among liberals for an investigation into what happened on Election Day.

"Demand an audit. Make the call," filmmaker Joss Whedon tweeted late Tuesday, with a picture of Clinton reading "She Won."


SOURCE: http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/23/politics/election-hack-hillary-clinton-donald-trump/


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Jill Stein raises $4.6 million ​

to request recounts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania

Drew Angerer | Getty Images | Jill Stein, the Green Party's presidential nomination


Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has raised enough money to request recounts in the swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, her campaign website announced Friday morning.

The campaign initially asked for $2.5 million but has now raised $4.6 million in the last two days. It is now asking for another $2.4 million so it can request a recount in Michigan which would take the total target up to $7 million. Stein claims that "data suggests a significant need to verify machine-counted vote totals" in all three states.

While no specific evidence of fraud or irregularity has been cited, the campaign has highlighted reported hacks into voter and party databases.

"In true grassroots fashion, we're turning to you, the people, and not big-money corporate donors to make this happen," Stein said on her campaign website.

Prominent cybersecurity experts have recently said that although the chances of the election results being tampered with are slim, a recount would be the best way to ensure that results are valid.

-Antonio José Vielma contributed to this story.


SOURCE: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/25/stei...t-recounts-in-wisconsin-and-pennsylvania.html


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The president is the only national elected position of office. This is why we need an electoral college, to prevent a corrupt state from stuffing the ballot and influencing a close national election that would be decided by a close popular vote. You can claim a million bogus people voted but you will only get a certain number of electors.

I remember the shenigans with the Florida recount, the type of things done behind the scenes.

 

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Green Party's Jill Stein files recount request in Wisconsin

 

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Slate: [URL='http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/11/25/the_seven_main_reasons_democrats_shouldn_t_contribute_to_jill_stein_s_recount.html']The Seven Main Reasons Democrats Shouldn’t Donate to Jill Stein’s Recount[/url]

1. The amount she's asking for keeps increasing. The amount of money needed for the recount has been suspiciously creeping upward since the fundraising drive was launched. At first, the goal was $2.5 million. Now it’s $7 million with no real explanation as to why the additional money is needed.


2. The increasing attorney fees. Another point of contention is the way the supposed attorney fees for the recount effort keep on increasing. Politico explains:

In an initial cached version of the fundraising page, they do not mention attorney fees in the
fundraising pitch. A cached version of the page from early Thursday morning then estimates that attorney fees will “likely to be another $1 million," while her page had set a goal of $4.5 million mid-day Thursday.
As of noon on Thursday, the fundraising page now estimates that attorney fees “are likely to be another $2-3 million, then there are the costs of the statewide recount observers in all three states,” raising the total cost to “$6-7 million.”​

3. No guarantees. Those critical of the effort are quick to point out that in the fundraising drive, Stein outright admits that she cannot guarantee recounts will actually happen. Stein also doesn’t say what any money that isn’t used for the recount will actually go to, beyond a general pledge that “the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.”


4. No smoking gun. “Let me be very clear: We do not have evidence of fraud,” Stein said in an interview. “We do not have smoking guns. What we do have is an election that was surrounded by hacking.” The push for a recount really went into overdrive with a New York magazine report that claimed cybersecurity experts were calling for Clinton’s campaign to contest the results. But since then several experts spoke up to say the evidence was far from clear-cut. “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not,” wrote J. Alex Halderman, one of the experts cited in the initial report. “I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong.” Even as some security and election experts call for paper ballots to be checked it’s important to note “there’s no evidence that the electronic machines were hacked or the election was compromised,” as NPR’s Camila Domonoske explained.


5. A recount wouldn’t necessarily disprove hacking anyway. Despite his skepticism, Halderman said nobody will know whether a cyberattack changed the result of the race unless there is a recount. But that’s not necessarily true. In Pennsylvania, for example, most machines don’t have paper ballots and if the past is any guide the recount could simply mean re-scanning the machine results, notes the Washington Post.


6. Stein doesn’t actually want to help Clinton. Stein clearly states that the effort is “not intended to help Hillary Clinton,” adding that “recounts are part of an election integrity movement to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the U.S. election system is.” After all, during the campaign, Stein made clear she didn’t prefer Clinton over Trump and has now said that the way Clinton has stayed out of the recount fray only shows the Democratic Party is corrupt. Some Democrats are also saying that it’s really rich for someone like Stein to worry about how a few thousand votes could affect the outcome of an election. “I really wish Jill Stein had not waited until after the election to be so concerned about a few thousand votes tipping the election to Trump,” wrote Dan Pfeiffer.

Dan PfeifferVerified account‏@danpfeiffer Nov 24

The amount of Democratic energy and money being wasted on recounts instead of trying to win the Louisiana Senate Race is mind boggling

• 

11:20 AM - 24 Nov 2016​

Having said all that though, some Clinton supporters are certainly on board with the effort, saying it’s better than nothing. Adam Parkhomenko, a prominent Clinton supporter, gave “kudos” to Stein “for leading on this.” Many Clinton backers were already calling for a recount even before Stein got on board and they see no reason to back down now even if they may not be fans of the person who is leading the effort.

Adam ParkhomenkoVerified account‏@AdamParkhomenko Nov 24

Adam Parkhomenko Retweeted​

I don't support Jill Stein. Never will. But I support democracy and the right to count every vote. And kudos to her for leading on this. https://twitter.com/dayjojo771980/status/801809537460269057…​

SOURCE: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...ldn_t_contribute_to_jill_stein_s_recount.html



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Clinton campaign: We are taking part in the recount

 

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NOW WHAT ?

 

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Trump charges, without evidence, millions voted illegally





NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump is claiming, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally in the election he won, issuing the baseless claim as part of his angry response to a recount effort led by the Green Party and joined by Hillary Clinton's campaign.

"I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Trump tweeted Sunday. He later alleged "serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California."

Trump's transition team did not respond to questions seeking evidence of the claims.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, said Monday that he had "not seen any voter irregularity in the millions."

"I don't know what he was talking about on that one," Lankford said of Trump on CNN's "New Day."

Indeed, there has been no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking that would change the results of the presidential contest between Trump and Clinton. The Democrat's team said it had been looking for abnormalities and found nothing that would alter the results.

Still, Clinton's campaign was joining a recount led by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in up to three states. Wisconsin election officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss a possible timeline for a recount of that state's presidential votes; recounts are possible in Pennsylvania and Michigan as well.

"We intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides," Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias said.

Trump narrowly won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and, as of Wednesday, held a lead of almost 11,000 votes in Michigan, with the results awaiting state certification Monday. All three would need to flip to Clinton to upend the Republican's victory, and Clinton's team says Trump has a larger edge in all three states than has ever been overcome in a presidential recount.

Still, Trump and his lieutenants assailed the effort, calling it fraudulent, the work of "crybabies" and, in Trump's view, "sad." Clinton leads the national popular vote by close to 2 million votes, but Trump won 290 electoral votes to Clinton's 232, not counting Michigan.

Trump spent the Thanksgiving holiday at his private club in Palm Beach, Florida and returned to New York Sunday night. He was scheduled to hold a series of meetings with prospective administration hires Monday as he seeks to build out his Cabinet and senior White House staff.

Trump's team was divided over his pick for secretary of state, one of the most prominent and powerful Cabinet posts. The president-elect is said to be choosing between former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee who fiercely criticized Trump throughout the presidential campaign.

In an unusual public airing of internal machinations, Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway warned Sunday that the president-elect's supporters would feel "betrayed" if he tapped former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as secretary of state. Romney was "nothing but awful" to him for a year, she said.

The spectacle of close aides who speak frequently with Trump in private being so explicit about their personal opinions in public raised the possibility that Conway was acting at Trump's behest. Romney denounced Trump in scathing terms during the campaign, prompting Trump to call him a "choker" who "walks like a penguin."

People involved in the transition process said Trump's decision on his secretary of state did not appear to be imminent. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and John Bolton, a former ambassador to the U.N., have also been under consideration.

Even with major administration decisions looming, Trump seems preoccupied by the prospect of a recount.

"Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in," He tweeted Sunday. "Nothing will change."

He quoted from Clinton's concession speech — "We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead" — and he concluded: "So much time and money will be spent - same result! Sad."

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Conway said Stein, "the Hillary people" and others supporting recounts have to decide whether they are going to back a peaceful transition "or if they're going to be a bunch of crybabies and sore losers about an election that they can't turn around."

Clinton's lawyer said her team has been combing through the results since the election in search of anomalies that would suggest hacking by Russians or others and found "no actionable evidence." But "we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself," he said.


SOURCE: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...legally/ar-AAkPEHO?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp


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4 Ways the Jill Stein Recount Screws Black Voters

In the end, it won’t change anything except to give GOP
leaders more reasons to enact suppressive voter-ID laws.

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By: Charles D. Ellison
November 30, 2016


Americans are, based on their loosely knit, religiouslike obsession with professional sports, a replay nation. When bad calls occur, millions of fans jump from couches and look to replays for divine intervention.

For proof, look no further than the oversized hope that Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s ambitious (and pipe-dreamy) move to recount ballots in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will somehow help us take back that big national “oops” we call President-elect Donald Trump. Because, let’s face it, the blame for where we’ve ended up lands on us all. It’s not just the manipulation of the process that put us in the current predicament—it was also our collective inability to swiftly repel Trump when we had a chance. Slam the Electoral College all you want, but when more than 40 percent of the electorate won’t show up, what else did you think was going to happen?


With Trump’s motley crew of transition picks giving us a massive Tums moment, excitement bubbled up that Stein (in quiet conjunction with Hillary Clinton’s campaign) could pull us back from the brink. That’s not happening. And with Stein hauling a handsome pile of cash from the replay faithful, what’s unnoticed are four ways that this effort leaves an already ass-out black electorate in the lurch:

1. Let Stein and Clinton tell It, voter suppression doesn’t exist.
Stein’s focus is the quest for deliberate irregularities in the electoral system, such as, for example, voter machine and database hacking. Strangely, Stein ’16 ignores a deep look into the systematic election hack that we did see take place, especially in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: voter-ID laws and other carefully designed voter-suppression tactics. Nor is the Clinton campaign interested: When Clinton campaign counsel Marc Erik Elias felt compelled to pen a Medium piece on the tag team with Stein, every plausible election-hack theory was mentioned (even “fake news”) … just not the fact that we just experienced the first major election without full Voting Rights Act protection in 50 years.

The impact of that was severe; this we do know: long lines at polling places serving black and brown populations; polling-place closures; intact voter-ID laws; early-voting elimination in some states, voter-roll purges in others; and the micromanaging harassment of Trump-inspired “poll watchers.” States like Texas and North Carolina straight ignored federal court orders to behave. In Wisconsin, observers noticed a 41,000-vote drop from 2012. In Pennsylvania, election judges and poll watchers were still asking for voter IDs even though that law was axed in 2012. These are all battleground states with large black population clusters.

So, what’s the deal? That’s a pretty big election hack if there ever was one—something that’s easily substantiated by a great deal of constant oversight from civil rights groups, watchdogs and an outgoing Obama-administration Justice Department. It’s as if black-voter grievances don’t matter. Still …



2. Here’s the catch: A recount could bolster voter suppression.
That sounds a bit off, but that’s the catch-22 as Stein keeps at this. This talk about the need for a recount, prompted by accusations that election integrity was widely compromised, could actually give voter-ID proponents the “I told you so” moment they need. That, unfortunately, could prompt a fresh movement from Republican state legislatures and governors who want to keep their black, brown and college-age voting populations perpetually boxed in, since states could move to strengthen or re-enact an array of creative voter-ID laws. And “Why not?” they’ll say. “Even the liberals say we’ve got a voting system problem.”

Of course, they’ll ignore charges that voting machines were hacked or didn’t work, and they will act as if they never did create the elaborate voter-suppression land we now live in. President-elect Trump’s nocturnal tweet fantasy claiming that “illegal” votes lost him the popular vote is the tip of that charge. If colluding Green Party cats and Democrats aren’t careful, Republicans could throw a big okey-doke on the recount effort, twisting it into a need for more voter-fraud mitigation efforts—even though we’ve never had a voter-fraud problem. But thanks to Stein, sure we do! And we know who ends up getting hurt the most when that happens.



3. It won’t change anything.
It was last reported that Stein was “within striking distance” of her $7 million recount financing goal, but the only thing a replay will accomplish is, well, Stein raising double what she raised throughout the entire course of her flatlining presidential campaign. We just got finished with one circus announcer dropping outlandish campaign promises he clearly had no plans to keep. Now comes a new one—from the far reaches of the old-school left—hustling false hope to the masses, especially the black ones grieving over President Barack Obama’s replacement.


It’s not as if this gives Stein any more votes than the barely registered 2 percent she got on Nov. 8. And it’s not likely that Clinton will get any mojo back. So, what’s the real purpose of this exercise? Despite all of its hollow diversity talk over the years, the Green Party (a leadership team made up of know-it-all white progressives, with the exception of Stein running mate Ajamu Baraka) likely doesn’t have any plans to help viable state, local or federal political candidates of color who seem much more qualified than she is. So, what’s the point?



4. It’s one giant distraction.
That’s what former state Sen. Nina Turner (D-Ohio) called it in a recent conversation with The Root. “I’m afraid it is, especially when we need to focus on 2017 and then 2018,” argued Turner, who plans on re-entering the political scene at some point (possibly with an Ohio gubernatorial bid).

But Turner’s right. Generally low voter enthusiasm and disastrous outcomes from this cycle should be a wake-up call for aggressive (and very immediate) political planning and mobilization for upcoming 2017 state races and 2018 congressional midterms. Turnout in the 2014 midterm—that really important every-two-year cycle everyone gets miffed about but few participate in—was an atrocious 36.7 percent, down from an equally disheartening 41.8 percent in 2010. One main culprit: black voters, for the most part, who just won’t pay attention to really crucial midterm and state legislative cycles, largely conceding them to white voters, who, in turn, cement Republican majorities in Congress as well as control of most state legislatures and governor mansions.​

For municipal elections, forget about it: Local election turnout, on average, is 20 percent. And yet 2017 presents big opportunities for the black electorate to gain back a little lost ground by picking governors in New Jersey and Virginia, along with friendlier legislatures in those states, as well as new mayors in big cities.​

Keep thinking the recount will save desperate black voters in search of an electoral miracle? Think again.

Keeping up with a recount actually leaves us a bit more politically empty-handed than we know.


Charles D. Ellison is a veteran political strategist and a contributing editor at The Root. He is also Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune, a frequent contributor to The Hill, the weekly Washington insider for WDAS-FM in Philadelphia and host of The Ellison Report, a weekly public-affairs magazine broadcast and podcast on WEAA 88.9 FM Baltimore. Follow him on Twitter.


SOURCE: http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/11/4-ways-the-jill-stein-recount-screws-black-voters/

 

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