Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said Wednesday her abbreviated recount effort showed the vote “was not carefully guarded” in Michigan and should spur legislative action to require automatic post-election audits. Republican President-elect Donald Trump was poised to maintain his 10,000-vote margin over Democrat Hillary Clinton when Michigan’s hand recount was halted more than two million ballots in, but Stein suggested the rare glimpse under the hood of the state election system served an important purpose. “What we discovered is we do not have a system that we can trust,” Stein said in a radio interview on Michigan’s Big Show, citing complaints from Detroit election officials who said 87 optical scanner voting machines failed on Election Day, along with other documented vote count and ballot handling irregularities.
The Massachusetts physician raised more than $7 million to pay for presidential election recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump gained votes in Wisconsin, but courts halted efforts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Clinton had gained 103 votes in the partial recount.
Stein failed to show she was an “aggrieved” candidate in Michigan, a legal condition for a recount request, and did not present “evidence of significant fraud or mistake” that would warrant court intervention, U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said in a ruling that effectively stopped the hand recount on Dec. 8.
Secretary of State spokesman Fred Woodhams on Wednesday disputed Stein’s suggestion that Michigan’s election system cannot be trusted. “The fact that after 2 million ballots were reviewed by hand, the second-place candidate added only 103 votes to her margin speaks for itself,” he said.
Full Article: Stein: Election audits should be automatic in Michigan.