National: Stein pushes Justice Department for investigation of electoral system | The Hill

Jill Stein is continuing her push to investigate the integrity of the U.S. electoral system, with lawyers for the former Green Party presidential candidate asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to probe the issue. “We write to urge the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the integrity of our nation’s election system generally, and our nation’s voting machines specifically, based on the information we discovered in the course of this representation,” reads the letter from Stein’s counsel dated Friday.

Editorials: Verifying vote should be norm | Lou Novak/The Detroit News

From the moment that Jill Stein requested a presidential recount in Michigan, Donald Trump and his Republican cronies have tried to thwart it at every turn. Despite their obstructionism, the recount began earlier this month but was stopped a few days later. The recount opponents prevailed after an onslaught of political maneuvers and lawsuits that finally found favor in the Republican bench of the Michigan Court of Appeals. It’s a sad day for our democracy when politicking prevails over ensuring the integrity of our election system. And in the media’s coverage of the political play-by-play, we missed the forest for the trees. Throughout this election, voters have endured implications, rumors, and outright accusations about a “rigged” system—vocalized frequently by none other than the president-elect himself, who then did an about-face and fought tooth and nail to prevent the verification of the vote.

Editorials: Why the Green Party Continues to Demand Presidential Recounts | David Cobb/The Nation

Presidential recounts are not about changing election results. At least, that is not their primary purpose. At their core, recounts are about ensuring confidence in the integrity of the voting system. It is unfortunate, if not all that surprising, that the two largest corporate-controlled political parties have chosen to stand in the way of these grassroots-demanded recounts—in the case of Republicans, actively blocking them in the courts; in the case of Democrats, capitulating in their refusal to push for them. In an election marked by so many irregularities, public distrust and outright evidence of hacking, Americans deserve to know now more than ever that the election was accurate and secure. That is the ultimate goal of this and every recount: to restore confidence in our elections and trust in our democracy. Consider the 2004 recount, for example. As the Green Party candidate for president that year, I led efforts to organize recounts in Ohio and New Mexico, in the wake of widespread complaints about the obstruction of legitimate voters, mostly in majority-black precincts, and tampering with computer voting machines on Election Day. The Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik supported our efforts, but the Democrats, led by nominee John Kerry, were silent. The investigations sparked by that recount did not change who won the electoral votes in New Mexico or Ohio. They did, however, uncover glaring problems with our voting system. A report published by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, spearheaded by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. John Conyers, found conclusive evidence that more than 100,000 voters—many concentrated in communities of color—were disenfranchised during the election. Among the irregularities caused by the intentional, illegal behavior included some 90,000 spoiled ballots, the improper purging of tens of thousands of voters by election officials, and improbably high turn out in certain counties, even surpassing 100 percent in some cases.

Florida: Appeals court rules lower court was correct to dismiss recount case | Tallahassee Democrat

The First District Court of Appeal has denied an appeal by three Central Florida voters to overturn a trial court’s ruling dismissing their suit. The court also denied their request to stay Monday’s electoral vote until the recount could take place. The DCA also struck down their motion to appeal the lower court’s ruling denying their motions to overturn the election results and order a recount. “Plaintiffs ask the Florida judicial system to shut down the presidential electoral process at this point to allow their elaborate recount lawsuit to proceed,” Judge Scott. Makar wrote in his concurring opinion, issued Friday. “The trial court’s thorough order, however, is eminently correct: no colorable basis exists for the relief that Plaintiffs seek,” Makar wrote. “At best, Plaintiffs raise political questions that no court — state or federal– can resolve….”

Maine: Recount bid ends, clearing way for legal marijuana in Maine | Bangor Daily News

The campaign that opposed a referendum seeking to legalize marijuana for recreational use in Maine abandoned its recount effort Saturday afternoon, clearing the way for Maine to become the latest state to allow use of the drug for nonmedical purposes. The citizen-initiated legalization effort appeared as Question 1 on the Nov. 8 ballot. Unofficial results showed the question winning by less than 1 percentage point, the closest contest on a ballot that included four other citizen-initiated referendums and a bond question.That narrow margin prompted opponents of legalization — organized as Mainers Protecting Our Youth and Communities — to ask the secretary of state to conduct a statewide recount. After a weekslong process that required ballots from all over the state to be collected and delivered to Augusta, the recount began earlier this month.

National: Stymied vote recount exposed flaws in ballot integrity, Jill Stein says | Los Angeles Times

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, conceded Tuesday that her three-state vote recount drive was “stopped in its tracks,” but said she’d illuminated the need to shore up the security of balloting nationwide. “While the count may have stopped, the movement for a voting system we can trust has been enormously energized,” Stein told reporters on a conference call. Stein raised more than $7 million to seek recounts of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump narrowly won those states. Courts have blocked recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Wisconsin recount that was completed Monday wound up widening Trump’s margin of victory there to 22,748 votes out of the 2,976,150 cast.

Editorials: Michigan recount reveals voting outrages | The Detroit News

With the move to recount Michigan’s presidential ballots still tangled up in the courts, we may never know for sure whether it might have changed the outcome of the election. But we did learn some outrageous things about the state’s electoral process. The key revelation is that the system in many places is rife with incompetence that results in the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters who cast ballots that don’t get counted. In Wayne County, for example, one-third of the ballots cast on Nov. 8 would not have been eligible for recount because of handling irregularities; in the city of Detroit, it was half the votes. Had the recount been allowed to proceed, it would have been useless without those ruined Detroit and Wayne County ballots, and others from Genesee County and elsewhere.

Pennsylvania: Judge rejects Green Party’s Pennsylvania recount case | Associated Press

A federal judge on Monday issued a stinging rejection of a Green Party-backed request to recount paper ballots in Pennsylvania’s presidential election, won narrowly by Republican Donald Trump, and scan some counties’ election systems for signs of hacking. In his 31-page decision, U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond said there were at least six grounds that required him to reject the Green Party’s lawsuit, which had been opposed by Trump, the Pennsylvania Republican Party and the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office. The Green Party has been successful in at least getting statewide recounts started in Wisconsin and Michigan, but it has failed to get a statewide recount begun or ordered in Pennsylvania. Suspicion of a hacked Pennsylvania election “borders on the irrational” while granting the Green Party’s recount bid could “ensure that that no Pennsylvania vote counts” given Tuesday’s federal deadline to certify the vote for the Electoral College, wrote Diamond, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, a Republican.

Editorials: Jill Stein has done the nation a tremendous public service | Jonathan S. Abady & Ilann M. Maazel/The Washington Post

As lead counsel in Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein’s quest to have votes recounted in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, we have been in court for the past two weeks trying to verify the integrity of the election and make sure that no one hacked our democracy. Some have cast Stein as a spoiler, or alleged that the recounts were futile, because they didn’t change who won the election. But the recount would only be futile if we, as Americans, ignored the lessons of the past weeks and preserved the status quo that is our broken voting system. To start, we must recognize that what we saw in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were recounts in name only. Though more than 161,000 people across the nation donated to the effort — and millions more demanded it with their voices — every imaginable financial, legal and political obstacle was thrown in the way of the recounts. In Michigan, a state court shut down the recount after only three days. In Wisconsin, instead of hand counting all paper ballots — the “gold standard” of election auditing — many ballots were fed into the same electronic machines used on Election Day, producing the same potentially faulty results.

Editorials: Jill Stein Pulls Back the Curtain on America’s Voting Chaos | The American Prospect

Let’s acknowledge that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein’s now-halted bid to recount the vote in three Rust Belt states served principally to earn her a lot of free media and fatten her political fundraising email list. Stein failed to furnish any evidence of the “hacking” and “security breaches” that her many press releases and public comments alleged, but she did scoop up $7.3 million from more than 160,000 donors in less than three weeks. Nevertheless, Stein’s arguably self-serving drive to recount votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin performed an important public service. As Stein noted this week in a press call to mark the end of her recount effort, she did spotlight some troubling weaknesses in the nation’s election system. Voting in America continues to be plagued by malfunctioning machines, byzantine rules, and insufficient cross-checks and audits to ensure that ballots are properly tallied. Stein’s recount bid captured the paradox of this year’s super-charged debate over voting. The most sensational claims and counter-claims about this year’s election—that the system was “rigged” and riddled with fraud, as Donald Trump alleged, or that voting machines may have been tampered with, as Stein herself declared—lacked any empirical evidence to back them up. But there was plenty of evidence that the more-pedestrian, nuts-and-bolts basics of election administration, particularly when it comes voting machines, are still not up to snuff. The system produced no major crisis this year, as Florida’s hanging chads did in the 2000 contested election, but that may simply be because the country dodged a bullet. Competing allegations of voter suppression, voter fraud, and Russian hacking—albeit of emails, not voting machines—have also damaged public confidence, making the need for a well-functioning, credible system all the more urgent.

Editorials: What We Learned from the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania Recounts | Marc Elias/Medium

Two weeks ago I published a Medium post outlining how the Clinton campaign would respond to Jill Stein’s plan to seek recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. I explained that we had not planned on seeking recounts because we had not uncovered actionable evidence of hacking or tampering with voting systems, equipment or results. However, I made clear that we would participate in any recount initiated by others to ensure the process proceeded in a manner that was fair to all sides. Though many have mischaracterized our efforts, I acknowledged in my Medium post (and subsequently in a Washington Post Q&A) that the results were not likely to change materially and that “the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount.” With the recounts no longer in process, and the electoral college safe harbor date now upon us, I wanted to write to update our supporters and detractors on how the process worked (or did not work) and what we learned.

Michigan: Records: 95 Detroit poll books missing for several days | The Detroit News

Detroit elections officials waited several days to deliver nearly 100 poll books to Wayne County officials charged with certifying the presidential election, newly released documents show. County clerk officials on Thursday released a memo to State Elections Director Chris Thomas that said 95 poll books from the 662 precincts weren’t available at the start of the canvass, which began the day after the Nov. 8 election. Five of those poll books, which contain the names of voters and ensure the integrity of elections, were never delivered to county canvassers and presumably remain missing. The revelation comes atop other irregularities that have prompted a state audit. Among other issues, The Detroit News reported this week that voting machines registered more votes than they should have in one-third of all city precincts.

Florida: Electors case goes to appellate court | Tallahassee Democrat

Three voters contesting the outcome of the 2016 Florida Presidential Election are determined to stop the state’s 29 electors from casting their ballots for Donald Trump. They have filed a motion with the First District Court of Appeal asking for the scheduled vote to be delayed until a full hand-ballot recount can be made, their attorney said today. “We are going to ask them to delay the vote, let us do the count and if we don’t find anything they can still vote as normal without any extra effort,” said Clint Curtis, a former NASA employee and computer programmer turned lawyer from Orlando. Curtis said he’s received money from Protect Our Elections, a Washington, D.C., based advocacy group that has launched a national letter-writing campaign to all 538 electors to not cast their votes for the president-elect. The website said it has raised over $50,000 to cover his fees.

Bulgaria: High court orders partial referendum recount | The Sofia Globe

Bulgaria’s Supreme Administrative Court ordered on December 14 a recount of ballots cast in the nationwide referendum on November 6 in 44 electoral precincts. The recount order comes after the initiative committee that gathered the signatures necessary to call the plebiscite lodged a complaint against the Central Electoral Committee, arguing that the electoral body had breached election rules, which could have altered the outcome of the referendum.

National: Stein campaign details recount spending | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

With recount efforts wrapping up, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein ended her fundraising Tuesday to review ballot tallies in Wisconsin and two other states, saying she will donate any leftover cash to voting rights groups. In the end, Wisconsin’s recount turned up changes to the ballot count of the top four finishers of just six-hundredths of 1%. Meanwhile, Stein’s bid for statewide recounts has been blocked in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Stein’s campaign said it raised $7.3 million for its recount efforts and has up to $7.4 million in outstanding costs, but expects those estimated expenses to decrease as the actual costs are tallied. In raising the money, Stein also collected the names of more than 161,000 donors and 10,000 volunteers that she can tap in the future.

Michigan: Detroit Voting Machine Failures Were Widespread on Election Day | TIME

More than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned on Election Day, officials say, resulting in ballot discrepancies in 59% of precincts that raise questions about the reliability of future election results in a city dominated by Democratic and minority voters. “This is not the first time,” adds Daniel Baxter, elections director for the city. “We’ve had this problem in nearly every election that we administer in the city of Detroit.” Baxter says that the machines were tested for accuracy before election day in accordance with state and federal guidelines, but that sometimes the machines “hit up against each other and malfunction” as they’re being transported to the precincts. The machines were optical scanners, meaning they registered and counted the votes marked on paper ballots. Many of the machines jammed over the course of election day, perhaps because Michigan had a two-page ballot this year, which meant that paper ballots were collected but inconsistently recorded by the machines.

Michigan: Michigan elections panel weighs value of vote recount | Detroit Free Press

All sides agreed Tuesday that state and local election officials did a generally good job on a statewide presidential recount that was halted by the courts on Wednesday after two and a half days of counting. But testimony before the Board of State Canvassers differed on whether the partial recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein served a useful purpose. Still, the board voted Tuesday 3-1 to formally reject Stein’s request for a recount. To Stein attorney Mark Brewer, who formally withdrew Stein’s recount request at Tuesday’s meeting of the state elections panel, the recount turned up significant problems with uncounted ballots, faulty machines, and large numbers of precincts that could not be recounted under state law.

Pennsylvania: Green Party seeks to overhaul procedures for future elections | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania certified its 2016 election results Monday, officially anointing Donald J. Trump as its choice for president. But the campaign of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein isn’t giving up its bid to change the way the state counts, and recounts, the ballots. “In Pennsylvania, we are planning to proceed in federal court with an examination and a challenge to what we think is a byzantine and unworkable recount regime,” said campaign attorney Jonathan Abady in a phone call with reporters. Unlike a federal lawsuit filed last week, which was rejected Monday by U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond in Philadelphioa, future litigation won’t seek to contest the 2016 vote tallies. Instead, the Stein campaign said it will focus on future elections, by seeking to overhaul recount procedures and its use of paperless voting machines.

Wisconsin: Jill Stein Says She’s Not Satisfied With Wisconsin Presidential Recount | Wisconsin Public Radio

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said Tuesday she is dissatisfied with Wisconsin’s presidential recount. On a call with reporters, Stein decried the use of machines in Wisconsin’s recount, which ended Monday, as well as the cost of the re-tallying. Stein expressed concern that Milwaukee County, in particular, used machines in its recount. “This was essentially a recount that looked everywhere except in the areas of greatest risk,” Stein said. “I think there’s enormous evidence that when you’re looking for the bank robber, you’ve got to look around the bank and I think unfortunately that’s what was avoided in the Wisconsin recount.” Stein requested a hand recount in all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, but was denied by the state Elections Commission and a subsequent court decision. State law empowers county elections officials to choose whether to use machines as they conduct their recount.

National: Green Party U.S. election recount bid comes to a close | Reuters

The recount effort by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in three U.S. states came to an end on Monday, after weeks of legal wrangling yielded only one electoral review in Wisconsin that favored Republican winner Donald Trump. A federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected Stein’s request for a recount and an examination of that state’s voting machines for evidence of hacking in the Nov. 8 election won by Trump. Meanwhile, Wisconsin election officials said on Monday they had completed their 10-day recount after finding that Trump’s margin of victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton had increased by 131 votes, bringing Trump’s total lead to 22,748. “The final Wisconsin vote is in and guess what – we just picked up an additional 131 votes. The Dems and Green Party can now rest. Scam!” Trump said on Twitter. Stein, who finished fourth, challenged the results in those two states as well as Michigan, where the state’s top court on Friday denied Stein’s last-ditch appeal to keep a recount going. All of those traditionally Democratic strongholds supported Trump over Clinton. Even if all three recounts had taken place, they were unlikely to change the outcome.

Editorials: Recounts should be the norm, not the exception | Carsten Schürmann & Jari Kickbusch/Los Angeles Times

Jill Stein, her supporters and a group of experts struggled mightily to get proper recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. They were accused of paranoia and of simply wasting time. Why is it so difficult, and so controversial, to get the results of a U.S. presidential election inspected and verified? Audits should be mandatory in all states; in fact, they’re part of the foundation of a healthy democracy. Recounts not only are important for finding proof that voting machines were misconfigured or hacked. In a meaningful recount, evidence representing the voter’s intent is compared against the published vote totals. Even if a recount proves that everything went as intended, it’s a way to reassure the public — especially the losing side — that the announced winner of the election is legitimate. A recount is comparable to checking the receipt before leaving the local grocery store. Some check, some don’t, but overall, we all agree that the ability to check a receipt is worth the paper it is printed on.

Michigan: State to audit ‘significant’ mismatches in Detroit vote | Associated Press

Michigan’s elections bureau ordered an investigation Monday into substantial ballot discrepancies in a small portion of Detroit’s voting precincts, after the discovery of a polling place where 300 people voted but only 50 ballots were properly sealed in a container. Since learning of the issue last week during Michigan’s presidential recount, state officials have learned of similar “significant mismatch” problems at roughly 20 of Detroit’s 490 precincts, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. He said there is no reason to think votes were not counted and the differences would not have affected Republican Donald Trump’s narrow victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the state. Clinton won 95 percent of Detroit’s vote. Detroit elections officials told the state that in the one precinct, the 250 missing ballots were left in the tabulator bin, “but we want to verify this,” Woodhams said. It was not immediately clear what caused the inconsistencies in other precincts.

Pennsylvania: Federal judge nixes Pennsylvania ballot recount. Why? | CS Monitor

There will be no recount of paper ballots in Pennsylvania, a federal judge ruled Monday. US District Judge Paul Diamond rejected a request backed by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to recount paper ballots and scan some counties’ election systems for signs that the 2016 presidential election in Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump won by a narrow margin, was hacked. In his 31-page decision, Judge Diamond wrote there existed at least six grounds that required him to reject the Green Party’s lawsuit, writing that the suspicion that the election was hacked “borders on the irrational.” The recount bid, he said, could “ensure that no Pennsylvania vote counts,” as Tuesday is the federal deadline to certify the vote for the Electoral College.

Wisconsin: Completed Wisconsin recount widens Donald Trump’s lead by 131 votes | Wisconsin State Journal

Wisconsin’s historic presidential recount ended Monday resulting in a net gain of 131 votes for President-elect Donald Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said. Trump added 844 votes to his total for the Nov. 8 election, while Clinton added 713. Overall, the commission said, voters cast 2.976 million ballots. The recount resulted in a net increase of 837 ballots. “Completing this recount was a challenge, but the real winners are the voters,” Elections Commission Chairman Mark Thomsen said in a statement after signing off on the statewide results. “Based on the recount, they can have confidence that Wisconsin’s election results accurately reflect the will of the people, regardless of whether they are counted by hand or by machine.” The last statewide recount, in a 2011 Supreme Court race, resulted in a net change of 312 votes for the top two candidates out of 1.5 million ballots cast.

Florida: Jill Stein promotes Orlando law firm-backed protests for Florida recount | Orlando Sentinel

An Orlando law firm is calling for protests across the state Sunday backing a full hand recount of the presidential election in Florida – and they just got a boost. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate behind recount efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, promoted the protests on Twitter Friday. “Here’s a list of places Florida voters will rally on Sunday to demand a recount,” she said, linking to a list of protest locations including the Orange and Osceola clerks of court offices in Orlando and Kissimmee.

Michigan: Stein concedes end of Michigan recount, suggests reform | Associated Press

Officially, history will record President-elect Donald Trump as having won the 2016 presidential race in Michigan by some 10,704 votes. But Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate in the 2016 election, believes that the numbers would be different if all 4.8 million votes cast in the Wolverine State were recounted. That won’t happen, Stein conceded in a rally in downtown Detroit on Saturday, a day after the non-recused members of the Michigan Supreme Court ruled, by a 3-2 margin, against Stein’s appeal, leaving the candidate with no recourse. “We may be moving out of the court of law, but we’re moving into the court of public opinion,” Stein said. … “In the three states where filed recounts, we had Donald Trump, his superPACs and the Republican Party pulling out all the stops,” Stein said. “And you have to wonder, why are they doing this? What is Donald Trump afraid of? Either he does not have faith in democracy or he does not believe he won this election.”

Michigan: Recount mess: What if Michigan had held the key to election? | Detroit Free Press

Imagine for a moment: What if Michigan’s 2016 presidential election had been a repeat of Florida’s in 2000? Imagine that Donald Trump’s lead over Hillary Clinton had been just 200 votes instead of 10,000 and that the whole country was waiting on one last state to pick its winner. Instead of examining hanging chads in Palm Beach County, the eyes of the world would instead be riveted on Wayne County, where one ballot box was sealed with duct tape and hundreds of precincts couldn’t be recounted because of other errors. A recount in Michigan in 2016 almost certainly wouldn’t have mattered. But what if it would have? “If this had been a scenario where Michigan would have been the deciding factor in a presidential election, we would have been embarrassed as a state,” said Jocelyn Benson, a law professor at Wayne State University who founded the nonpartisan Michigan Center for Election Law. “It would have brought national attention to the inadequacies of an election system that is in desperate need of reform.”

Voting Blogs: Decision Suspending Michigan ‘Recount’ Threatens What’s Left of American Democracy | Brad Blog

If allowed to stand, the reasoning behind U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Goldsmith’s December 7, 2016 decision [PDF] in Stein v. Thomas to halt the Michigan presidential “recount” is flawed, at best. Issued, ironically enough, on the day we commemorate what President Franklin D. Roosevelt described as “a date which will live in infamy”, it is by no means an exaggeration to suggest that Judge Goldsmith’s reasoning could inflict greater harm on the very foundations of our constitutional form of democracy than that inflicted by the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The halt to the “recount” came just two days after Judge Goldsmith issued a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) directing the MI Canvassing Board to immediately commence the “recount” and one day after a U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal decision, upholding that TRO. Under that 6th Circuit appeals ruling, Judge Goldsmith was obligated to revisit the issue if “the Michigan courts determine that Plaintiffs’ recount is improper for any reason.” Separately, on Dec. 6, the Michigan state appellate court ruled that, under MI law, only a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning has a right to initiate a post-election count. But that state court ruling, by three Republican judges, did not justify Judge Goldsmith’s decision to halt a “recount” that had been predicated on Dr. Jill Stein’s rights under the U.S. Constitution.

North Carolina: Concession in auditor race wraps up North Carolina elections | Associated Press

North Carolina’s fall election essentially wrapped up Friday as the trailing candidate in the state auditor’s race conceded near the end of a statewide recount and officials certified results for president, U.S. Senate, governor and scores of other contests. Democratic State Auditor Beth Wood won another four-year term after Republican challenger Chuck Stuber said it appears his campaign would come up short on the vote count. With nearly all 100 counties completing the recount Stuber requested earlier this week, Wood was leading by a little over 6,000 votes from more than 4.5 million votes cast. “Now that we have won I am ready to move forward with my third term to continue the mission in helping our state become a model for the nation in efficiency and budgetary effectiveness,” Wood said in a release.

Wisconsin: Judge Rules Against Attempt To Halt Wisconsin Presidential Recount | Wisconsin Public Radio

A federal judge has ruled against an attempt to halt Wisconsin’s presidential recount. Judge James Peterson denied the request from two super PACs that supported President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign Friday morning. “It’s crystal clear to me that I don’t have the basis to stop the recount,” Peterson said. “The recount looks like it’s going as the state said: smoothly.” The lawsuit claimed Wisconsin’s recount violates equal protection requirements, puts the state at risk of missing a federal elections reporting deadline and may cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory.