Just in case, the State of Michigan is preparing for a recount of nearly 4.8 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential race. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, has raised more than $5 million to pay for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. She filed a formal recount request Friday afternoon with the Wisconsin Elections Commission and faces a Monday deadline in Pennsylvania and Wednesday in Michigan. A recount won’t be cheap, and it will be a monumental task for the Secretary of State and 83 county clerks around Michigan. She can’t request a recount in Michigan until the vote is certified, which is scheduled to happen at 2 p.m. Monday, when the Board of Canvassers meets to make the results — which show Republican Donald Trump with a 10,704-vote lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton — official. After the certification, she has until Wednesday afternoon to make the recount request.
“What we’re doing is standing up for an election system that we can trust. We deserve to have votes that we can believe in,” she said in a video on her Facebook page. “This is a commitment that Greens have expressed that we stand for election integrity, that we support voting systems that respect our vote. We demand voting systems that are accurate, that are publicly controlled, that are not privatized.”
Her campaign manager, David Cobb, said the recount request in all three states is a given because of: Michigan’s close election results; the fact that the vast majority of pre-election and exit polls in the state showed a lead for Clinton; and that there was a significant under-vote on Nov. 8, when an estimated 85,000 people cast ballots but did not make a selection in the presidential race. “It is great that there are paper ballots in Michigan, but the only way to confirm the results is to do an audit or a recount,” Cobb said.
The state has some experience with statewide election recounts, although not in nearly five decades, said Chris Thomas, director of elections at the Secretary of State office. One was done after one of Soapy Williams’ races for governor, as well as the daylight saving time vote in 1968, when voters rejected the issue by 490 votes. Voters passed daylight saving time when it came back to the ballot in 1972. “Our plans are being drafted,” Thomas said. “We’re on top of it. We’ve got some blueprints on how it will be done.”
Full Article: Michigan preparing for potential hand recount of 4.8M presidential votes.