Chances that the Wisconsin results will be overturned are slim to none. As Donald Trump said “It’s a scam”.
Madison — The Wisconsin Elections Commission set a timetable Monday for a recount of the presidential election but rejected a request to conduct it by hand made by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who quickly responded that she would sue.
Also Monday, Stein filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to force a recount there and her supporters began filing recount requests at the precinct level there. Stein — who received just a tiny piece of the vote —also plans to ask for a recount in Michigan on Wednesday.
Unless Stein wins her lawsuit in Dane County Circuit Court, officials in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties would decide on their own whether to do their recounts by hand. That could mean some counties perform recounts by machine and some by hand.
Citing the results of a 2011 statewide recount that changed only 300 votes, Elections Commission chairman Mark Thomsen, a Democrat, said this presidential recount is very unlikely to change Republican Donald Trump’s win in the state.
“It may not be 22,177,” said Thomsen, referring to Trump’s win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the vote count. “But I don’t doubt that the president-elect is going to win that.”
Thomsen dismissed Stein’s claims of problems with the vote as unfounded and misleading. But he directed his toughest criticism to Trump’s unsupported allegations that millions of people voted illegally nationwide, calling them “an insult to the people that run our elections.”
The commission is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans. It adopted the recount plans unanimously.
Stein is seeking to pay for the recount of Wisconsin’s election — in which she received about 31,000 votes, or 1% — to make sure that Democrat Hillary Clinton really lost Wisconsin to Republican Donald Trump by some 22,000.
Independent candidate Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente, who received about 1,500 votes, also requested a recount.
“We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system,” Stein said in a written statement. “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.”