Jill Goddamn Stein Files For Recount in Pennsylvania, Has Raised $6.3 Million to Date 

By Anna Merlan  |  November 28, 2016 | 7:55pm
Politics

Jill Stein—Green Party presidential candidate, low-key election spoiler, and the unlikely person making this month very interesting—has filed for a recount in Pennsylvania. In a fundraising effort she began on Thursday, Stein has raised over $6 million to fund recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, although whether the recounts will actually, you know, do anything is an open question.

Stein formally filed for a recount on Monday in Pennsylvania, after doing so in Wisconsin on Friday, just under the deadline. While several election lawyers and computer scientists have suggested that those three states were particularly vulnerable to hacking or vote-tampering, journalists who monitored the election disagree.

In a lengthy, slightly irritable tweetstorm, ProPublica explained that they don’t believe there is any evidence whatsoever of “rigging,” as they put it.

(It continues, but you get the idea, I think.)

In a statement, Stein said, not for the first time, that she’s doing this to ensure the transparency and accuracy of our voting system.

“We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system. We need to verify the vote in this and every election so that Americans of all parties can be sure we have a fair, secure and accurate voting system.”

The Clinton campaign announced last week that they’ll have their lawyers present at the recount efforts, even though, as their general counsel Mark Elias wrote on Medium, they don’t think anybody hacked anything:

Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.

Elias is also getting understandably defensive on Twitter about this whole thing.

It’s almost reassuring to see that in these trying times, Jill Stein is still a reliable irritant for literally every side of this thing.

 
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