I thought Donald Trump won the US presidential election. What's this about state recounts?
Yes, Trump did win the election and is scheduled to take office on January 20th as the 45th US president, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein has filed recount requests in three states that narrowly sealed Trump's victory in the November 8th election: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
As it stands, Trump won the electoral college – the state-by-state voting system that decides the race – by 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232 votes, despite the Democrat beating him in the popular vote. Votes are still being certified but Clinton leads by more than two million votes (64.5 million to 62.4 million).
Jill who? How many votes did she receive?
Stein, a medical doctor and activist, came a distant fourth place in the election, receiving 1.4 million votes nationwide and a fraction of the votes that Trump won in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, so she has no chance of winning. Still, she has called the voting system “insecure” and said that the recounts were necessary to “shine a light on just how untrustworthy the US election system is”, pointing to allegations about irregularities with electronic voting machines in a campaign dominated by claims of hacking.
What is the basis for Stein’s claims?
Several computer scientists and election lawyers led by John Bonifax and J Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan centre for computer security and society, called for a recount on suspicions of vulnerabilities around paperless voting machines. For example, they found that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 per cent fewer votes in counties where there was e-voting that could have been manipulated.
So could a different outcome in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan declare Clinton the winner?
Theoretically, yes. The 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania, 16 in Michigan and 10 in Wisconsin would hand Clinton victory with 278 electoral votes, putting her over the 270-vote majority. The race was close in all three states: a percentage point or less separated the two main candidates. Trump beat Clinton by 71,303 in Pennsylvania, 22,177 in Wisconsin and 10,704 in Michigan, the state’s closest race in more than 75 years.
And will it happen?
Highly unlikely. Clinton would need a swing of more than 100,000 votes in the three states so there would have to be widespread voter fraud. Election officials have found no evidence of this and Stein has conceded that the recounts are unlikely to change the outcome. Even voting experts who raised concerns believe that the poll-defying results in the three “rust belt” states are “probably not” due to hacking.
Have recounts in the past resulted in these kinds of swings?
No. The Green Party succeeded in obtaining a recount in Ohio in the 2004 race that reduced a George W Bush’s winning tally over John Kerry across the state’s 88 counties by just 285 votes. Even in Bush’s contested 2000 election with Al Gore and the famous Florida recount, contentious votes numbered in the hundreds, not thousands.
I take it that Trump is not happy about all this?
Nope. He has accused the Green Party of trying to “fill up their coffers” with the recount requests – Stein has raised more than €6 million to fund these costly exercises involving millions of votes. Trump is particularly angry that the Clinton camp has supported Stein’s efforts. The property mogul embarked on a Twitter tirade over 12 hours last weekend denouncing Clinton for welshing on her pre-election promise to respect the result and her election-night concession. He even bizarrely raised questions about the integrity of the election that he won. He claimed, without offering any evidence, that he would have beaten Clinton in the popular vote had “millions” of people not voted illegally in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – an allegation that has been rubbished by state election officials.
“So much time and money will be spent – same result! Sad,” Trump tweeted.
