Tag Archives: election recount

President-elect Donald J. Trump is well into filling out his cabinet and picking key advisers. But a move to challenge the vote tallies in three swing states — an extreme long shot to reverse his Electoral College majority — is advancing in the background, creating a noisy distraction on Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed and raising last-ditch hopes of some Hillary Clinton supporters. In Wisconsin, elections officials said on Monday that a recount of the state’s nearly three million votes would most likely begin on Thursday. In Pennsylvania, Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, who initiated the recounts, filed a legal challenge of the results in state court. And the Stein campaign said it planned to request a recount in Michigan on Wednesday. Neither Ms. Stein nor the Clinton campaign has found evidence of election tampering in any of the three states, where Mr. Trump beat Mrs. Clinton by a combined margin of only about 100,000 votes. But once Ms. Stein seized on the issue last week, the Clinton campaign said it, too, would join in the efforts to seek recounts.

Editorials: Why I Support An Election Audit, Even Though It’s Unlikely To Change The Outcome | Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight

Here at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been skeptical of claims of irregularities in the presidential election. As we pointed out last week, there are no obvious statistical anomalies in the results in swing states based on the type of voting technology that each county employed. Instead, demographic differences, particularly the education levels of voters, explain the shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016 fairly well. But that doesn’t mean I take some sort of philosophical stance against a recount or an audit of elections returns, or that other people at FiveThirtyEight do. Such efforts might make sense, with a couple of provisos. The first proviso: Let’s not call it a “recount,” because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.

Michigan: Officials prepare for ‘monumental’ presidential recount | Detroit Free Press

County clerks are preparing to recount, by hand, the 2016 presidential election and do it by Dec. 12. In Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, that means nailing down a central location to perform the recount in each county and finding enough workers to carry out the tedious task of going over hundreds of thousands of ballots one at a time. “This is a monumental undertaking,” said Joe Rozell, director of elections in Oakland County, where 678,090 ballots must be reviewed one-by-one. “We’ve never had a countywide recount of this magnitude.” The window for a possible statewide recount opened on Monday when the Michigan Board of Canvassers certified the state’s presidential election results, which showed Republican nominee Donald Trump won the state by 10,704 votes. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has indicated she will request a recount in Michigan by Wednesday’s deadline. A recount would begin on Friday in the state’s 19 largest counties, which includes Oakland, Wayne and Macomb.

Michigan: Here’s how a hand recount of 4.8 million ballots would actually work | Michigan Radio

This could be a stressful week for Chris Thomas, Michigan’s director of elections. Thomas would be the guy in charge of recounting, by hand, Michigan’s 4.8 million ballots. That would be triggered if Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein makes the request. “The thing that keeps me up at night is just being able to finish on time,” Thomas says. “It’s probably going to be a ten day recount, to do an entire state, and that’s going to be tough. And it’s going to really challenge the elections officials across this state.” Those officials are already very confused. Different city clerks have completely different ideas about how this process would work. One clerk says the recount is done in teams of three, with one person reading off the ballot and the two other people tallying each one on separate spreadsheets.

North Carolina: McCrory campaign said it would appeal election complaints – but hasn’t | News & Observer

As Republican-led county election boards began to reject GOP complaints, Gov. Pat McCrory’s campaign said Nov. 18 it expected the rulings to be “immediately appealed to the State Board of Elections.” Ten days later, the state board has received only two appeals – both challenging decisions by the Durham County Board of Elections. In those appeals, Republicans are seeking a hand recount and an opportunity to inspect absentee ballot envelopes for signs of fraud. But without more appeals, Republican claims of voter fraud and irregularities in more than 50 counties appear to have fizzled. McCrory trails Democratic challenger Roy Cooper by about 9,700 votes. As of Monday evening, only three counties had not yet held hearings on the complaints, which include allegations that ineligible felons and dead people voted, and that some voters cast ballots in multiple states. Hearings in those counties are scheduled for this week.

Pennsylvania: Jill Stein files petition seeking Pennsylvania presidential election recount | PennLive

An attorney for Green Party candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Monday in state Commonwealth Court asking for a recount of Pennsylvania’s 2016 presidential election. In the last week, Stein raised $6.2 million in order to launch recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states that President-elect Donald Trump won by about 1 percentage point. In the Keystone State, the businessman received about 70,000 more votes than Clinton. Stein garnered less than 50,000 votes. One of the chief factors cited attorney Lawrence Otter’s petition include problems with the state’s electronic voting system that a computer scientist believes could make it vulnerable to hackers. Others include the computer hacking of the Democratic National Committee and “discontinuity” between pre-election public opinion polls and the final result.

Pennsylvania: Stein campaign files Pennsylvania recount suit | Philadelphia Inquirer

Stein’s camp filed a recount petition last week in Wisconsin, and is expected to do so this week Michigan. Clinton lost each of the state by fewer than 100,000 votes. She lost Pennsylvania by about 71,300 votes. As of Monday evening, Stein had raised nearly $6.4 million dollars, covering the costs of recounts in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and is close to her total goal of $7 million goal to cover recount costs in Michigan. But when it comes to the Keystone State, it turns out raising the money might have been the easiest step. As Stein points out herself in a video posted on Sunday, initiating a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s vote is “especially complicated.” Unlike Wisconsin, Stein can’t simply file a direct request for a recount, leaving just two paths for a potential statewide audit.

Pennsylvania: Allegheny County holds off on certifying election results | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein launched a two-pronged bid to re-examine Pennsylvania’s presidential election results Monday. And while even some supporters of the effort say they don’t expect to overturn Donald J. Trump’s win in the state, the effort has already complicated the timeline for certifying the results in Allegheny County. On Monday afternoon, the Stein campaign filed a Commonwealth Court petition on behalf of more than 100 voters, expressing “grave concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machines used in their districts.” The petition, which calls the Nov. 8 election “illegal,” is part of a Green effort to recount ballots in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. “We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system,” said Ms. Stein in a statement Monday. Citing “accusations of irregularities and hacks” of Democratic Party emails and voter-registration databases, she said, “People of all political persuasions are asking if our election results are reliable.”

Wisconsin: Elections Commission rejects hand recount mandate; Stein to sue | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin rejects hand recount mandate; Stein to sue | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel #url#

Wisconsin: Clinton campaign will participate in Wisconsin recount, with an eye on ‘outside interference,’ lawyer says | The Washington Post

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has been quietly exploring whether there was any “outside interference” in the election results and will participate in the election recount in Wisconsin initiated by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, a Clinton campaign lawyer revealed Saturday. In a Medium post, Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias said that the campaign had received “hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton,” especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where the “combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes.” Elias said the campaign had “not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology.” But because of the margin of victory — and because of the degree of apparent foreign interference during the campaign — Elias said that Clinton officials had “quietly taken a number of steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states.” He said that the Clinton campaign would participate in the Stein-initiated recount in Wisconsin by having representatives on the ground monitoring the count and having lawyers represent them in court if needed. And if Stein made good on efforts to prompt similar processes in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Elias said, the Clinton campaign would do so there, as well.

National: Clinton camp splits from White House on Jill Stein recount push | The Guardian

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said on Saturday it would help with efforts to secure recounts in several states, even as the White House defended the declared results as “the will of the American people”. The campaign’s general counsel, Marc Elias, said in an online post that while it had found no evidence of sabotage, the campaign felt “an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton”. “We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton,” Elias wrote, “and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted.” In response, President-elect Donald Trump said in a statement: “The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’”

National: U.S. Officials Defend Integrity of Vote, Despite Hacking Fears | The New York Times

The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.” The statement came as liberal opponents of Donald J. Trump, some citing fears of vote hacking, are seeking recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — where his margin of victory was extremely thin. A drive by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, for recounts in those states had brought in more than $5 million by midday on Friday, her campaign said, and had increased its goal to $7 million. She filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday, about an hour before the deadline. In its statement, the administration said, “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect.”

Michigan: State readies for presidential recount as cutoff looms | The Detroit News

Elections officials are preparing for a possible presidential election recount in Michigan that could begin as soon as next week, state Director of Elections Chris Thomas said Friday. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has indicated she plans to jumpstart a recount in the Great Lakes state over fears that Michigan’s election results could have been manipulated by hackers. Republican President-elect Donald won the state by 10,704 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to unofficial updated results posted Wednesday. By Friday afternoon, Stein had raised more than $5 million of her $7 million goal to cover the cost of a recount in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan “to ensure the integrity of our elections” because “there is a significant need to verify machine-counted vote totals,” according to her campaign website. Stein finished nearly 2.3 million votes behind Trump in Michigan and received 1.1 percent of the vote. Michigan’s deadline for initiating a recount is Wednesday. “We have not heard from anybody,” Thomas said about a Stein recount request. “We’re just trying to be proactive, make sure we have plans.”

North Carolina: Gov. Pat McCory will accept defeat if recount in Durham upholds previous results | News & Observer

Gov. Pat McCrory is ready to withdraw his request for a statewide recount if a new hand count of Durham County votes produces the same results as Election Day, his campaign announced Saturday evening. The governor is asking the N.C. State Board of Elections to hold an expedited hearing on an appeal of the Durham County election board’s denial of a request for a recount there. The state board on Saturday called for a Sunday afternoon meeting by phone to discuss this matter and a federal lawsuit challenging same-day registration ballots. “If a Durham recount provides the same results as earlier posted, the McCrory Committee will be prepared to withdraw its statewide recount request in the Governors race,” the campaign’s news release says.

Wisconsin: Historic recount will have to move quickly | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wisconsin will begin a historic presidential recount next week and the state could risk losing its ability to have its 10 electoral votes counted if it doesn’t meet key deadlines next month. Hitting a Dec. 13 deadline could be particularly tricky if Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is able to force the recount to be conducted by hand, Wisconsin’s top election official said. Stein and independent presidential candidate Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente separately filed recount requests late Friday, the last day they were able to do so. Stein received about 31,000 votes and De La Fuente about 1,500 out of 3 million cast. One or both of them will have to pay for the recount because they lost by more than 0.25%. The cost could top $1 million.

Wisconsin: State to recount presidential votes | The Hill

Wisconsin will undertake a recount of its presidential election votes after two requests from third-party candidates. Green Party nominee Jill Stein filed her request just before the deadline Friday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Commission announced. Reform Party candidate Rocky De La Fuente also filed for a recount. “We are standing up for an election system that we can trust; for voting systems that respect and encourage our vote, and make it possible for all of us to exercise our constitutional right to vote,” Stein said in a statement. “We demand voting systems that are accurate, secure and accountable to the people. This is part of a larger commitment to election reform that our campaign and the Green Party has long stood for, which includes open debates, an end to voter ID laws and voter suppression, and ranked choice voting.” The Wisconsin Elections Commission said it is working under a Dec. 13 deadline to finish the recount.

National: Jill Stein raises $6 million for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania | CS Monitor

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has raised almost $6 million to petition the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to recount votes in order to determine if hacking skewed the election away from the expected victor, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In all three states, President-elect Donald Trump won an upset victory with a tiny margin. If the trio had gone blue, as was expected, Mrs. Clinton would have earned enough electoral votes to secure the election. Proponents of the recount have compared it to instant replay in a sporting event, but critics say it undermines confidence in the electoral process. While Clinton supporters are holding on to their last hope to see her in the White House, the Obama administration has announced that the election was not hacked, by Russians or anyone else. “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect,” the Obama administration wrote in a statement. “Nevertheless, we stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” it added.

National: Hillary Clinton’s Team to Join Wisconsin Recount Pushed by Jill Stein | The New York Times

Nearly three weeks after Election Day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday that it would participate in a recount process in Wisconsin incited by a third-party candidate and would join any potential recounts in two other closely contested states, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Clinton campaign held out little hope of success in any of the three states, and said it had seen no “actionable evidence” of vote hacking that might taint the results or otherwise provide new grounds for challenging Donald J. Trump’s victory. But it suggested it was going along with the recount effort to assure supporters that it was doing everything possible to verify that hacking by Russia or other irregularities had not affected the results. In a post on Medium, Marc Elias, the Clinton team’s general counsel, said the campaign would take part in the Wisconsin recount being set off by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and would also participate if Ms. Stein made good on her plans to seek recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Clinton lost those three states by a total of little more than 100,000 votes, sealing her Electoral College defeat by Mr. Trump.

Voting Blogs: Listening and Responding To Calls for an Audit and Recount | Marc Elias/Medium

Over the last few days, officials in the Clinton campaign have received hundreds of messages, emails, and calls urging us to do something, anything, to investigate claims that the election results were hacked and altered in a way to disadvantage Secretary Clinton. The concerns have arisen, in particular, with respect to Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — three states that together proved decisive in this presidential election and where the combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes. It should go without saying that we take these concerns extremely seriously. We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted. Moreover, this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign: the U.S. government concluded that Russian state actors were behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the personal email accounts of Hillary for America campaign officials, and just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government was behind much of the “fake news” propaganda that circulated online in the closing weeks of the election. For all these reasons, we have quietly taken a number of steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states.

Michigan: State preparing for potential hand recount of 4.8M presidential votes | Detroit Free Press

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.

North Carolina: Governor requests vote recount in tight race | Reuters

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory announced on Tuesday he has officially requested a recount of votes from the Nov. 8 election with official results showing him trailing his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Roy Cooper, by one-tenth of a point. The gubernatorial race in the ninth largest U.S. state remained undecided two weeks after Election Day. Officials with the State Board of Elections were continually updating results as they arrived from the state’s 100 counties. A recount is mandatory if the margin is less than 10,000 votes once all 100 counties have finished their canvasses, a spokesman for the election board said. As of Tuesday afternoon, Cooper’s lead was 6,187 out of 4.7 million votes cast.

Wisconsin: Election recount will take place in Wisconsin, after Stein files petition | The Washington Post

An election recount will take place soon in Wisconsin, after former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Friday with the state’s Election Commission, the first of three states where she has promised to contest the election result. The move from Stein, who raised millions since her Wednesday announcement that she would seek recounts of Donald Trump’s apparent election victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, came just 90 minutes before Wisconsin’s 5 p.m. Friday deadline to file a petition. Now it will keep some hope alive for many Hillary Clinton supporters for another few weeks while Wisconsin recounts ballots before a Dec. 13 deadline. Trump scored upset victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and seems on the path to declare a victory in Michigan as well, though the result of the election in that state will not be certified officially until Monday. Had Clinton won those three states, previously seen as part of the Democrats’ “firewall,” she would have secured enough electoral votes to win the election.

National: Jill Stein raises over $4.5m to request US election recounts in battleground states | The Guardian

Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is preparing to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states. Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a multimillion-dollar fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The drive has already raised more than $4.5m, which the campaign said would enable it to file for recounts in Wisconsin on Friday and Pennsylvania on Monday. The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states. Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified,” she said in a statement. “We deserve elections we can trust.” Stein’s move came amid growing calls for recounts or audits of the election results by groups of academics and activists concerned that foreign hackers may have interfered with election systems. The concerned groups have been urging Hillary Clinton, the defeated Democratic nominee, to join their cause.

National: Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones) | WIRED

After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states. Dig into their argument, however, and it’s less alarmist than it might appear. If anything, it’s practical. There’s no evidence that the outcome of the presidential election was shifted by compromised voting machines. But a statistical audit of electronic voting results in key states as a routine safeguard—not just an emergency measure—would be a surprisingly simple way to ease serious, lingering doubts about America’s much-maligned electoral security. “Auditing ought to be a standard part of the election process,” says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT. “It ought to be a routine thing as much as a doctor washing his hands.” … While there’s no indication that polling places in the three states Halderman calls out were hacked, it’s well established that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to malware that could corrupt votes. Many US voting machines today scan a paper ballot that the voter fills out by hand, and many electronic systems produce a paper record as well. In fact, Halderman notes, about 70 percent of Americans live in voting districts that leave a paper trail. record exists that can be used to check its digital results. But all too often, no one ever does, he writes. “No state is planning to actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the computer-based outcome was wrong,” Halderman says.

National: Clinton Being Pushed to Seek Vote Recount in 3 States | Associated Press

A group of election lawyers and data experts has asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to call for a recount of the vote totals in three battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to ensure that a cyberattack was not committed to manipulate the totals. There is no evidence that the results were hacked or that electronic voting machines were compromised. The Clinton campaign on Wednesday did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it would petition for a recount before the three states’ fast-approaching deadlines to ask for one. President-elect Donald Trump won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by razor-thin margins and has a small lead in Michigan. All three states had been reliably Democratic in recent presidential elections. … Many election experts have called for routine post-election audits designed to boost public confidence in vote outcomes, by guarding against both tampering and natural vote-counting mistakes. These could involve spot-checks of the voting records and ballots, typically in randomly selected precincts, to make sure that votes were accurately recorded.

National: Clinton camp remains mum as 3-state recount urged over hacking questions | The New York Times

Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin, a combined gap that is narrowing. Some of her impassioned supporters are urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College. In recent days, the supporters have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to ensure the election was not hacked. “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer-science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on the online-publishing platform Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.” More likely, he wrote, pre-election polls were “systematically wrong.” But the only way to resolve the lingering questions would be to examine “paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states,” he wrote.

Editorials: U.S. elections are a mess, even though there’s no evidence this one was hacked | Bruce Schneier/The Washington Post

Was the 2016 presidential election hacked? It’s hard to tell. There were no obvious hacks on Election Day, but new reports have raised the question of whether voting machines were tampered with in three states that Donald Trump won this month: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The researchers behind these reports include voting rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, both respected in the community. They have been talking with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but their analysis is not yet public. … Further investigation of the claims raised by the researchers would help settle this particular question. Unfortunately, time is of the essence — underscoring another problem with how we conduct elections. For anything to happen, Clinton has to call for a recount and investigation. She has until Friday to do it in Wisconsin, until Monday in Pennsylvania and until next Wednesday in Michigan. I don’t expect the research team to have any better data before then. Without changes to the system, we’re telling future hackers that they can be successful as long as they’re able to hide their attacks for a few weeks until after the recount deadlines pass.

Editorials: E-Voting Machines Need Paper Audits to be Trustworthy | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Election security experts concerned about voting machines are calling for an audit of ballots in the three states where the presidential election was very close: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. We agree. This is an important election safety measure and should happen in all elections, not just those that have a razor-thin margin. Voting machines, especially those that have digital components, are intrinsically susceptible to being hacked. The main protection against hacking is for voting machines to provide an auditable paper trail. However, if that paper trail is never audited, it’s useless. EFF worked hard, alongside many others, to ensure that paper trails were available in many places across the nation. While there are still places without them, we have made great strides. Yet this election was a forceful reminder of how vulnerable all computer systems are. We not only need elections to be auditable, we need them to be audited. We should use this opportunity to set a precedent of auditing electronic voting results to strengthen confidence—not only in this election, but in future ones.

North Carolina: 2004 race may have set precedent for governor’s outcome | News & Observer

It was a statewide race that wasn’t decided for 10 months, and then not by a vote of the people but by 114 legislators. Now, with North Carolina’s governor’s race still undecided after two weeks, political observers are taking another look at the disputed 2004 election for state superintendent of public instruction. The race tested a little-known provision of the state constitution, came close to a showdown with the state Supreme Court and set a precedent for deciding contested elections – perhaps including this year’s gubernatorial race. Since trailing Democrat Roy Cooper by around 5,000 votes on election night, Republican Gov. Pat McCrory has seen his allies file protests in more than half the state’s counties. Meanwhile Cooper’s lead has risen to what more than 7,700 votes, according to the state elections board. Cooper puts the margin at more than 8,500. McCrory has officially asked for a recount even as election officials are still counting votes and reviewing challenges. And whoever ends up trailing after the official count could appeal the results – directly to the General Assembly. That’s what happened in 2004.

Wisconsin: Stein campaign raises enough money to fund a recount of Wisconsin’s presidential election | Wisconsin State Journal