Jill Stein got less than 1% of the vote nationwide in our presidential election, but after raising more than $7 million to do a recount (at an estimated cost of around $2 million), Jill Stein finds out she missed the deadline to file for a recount in PA. Where will all of the money go that she raised to either throw the election for Crooked Hillary, or to make Trump’s presidency appear to be illegitimate?
Jill Stein had everything she needed to launch a presidential recount. She had the cash, the grassroots fervor and the spotlight of an adoring media. But there’s one thing she needed to overturn Trump’s victory: a calendar.
Stein missed Pennsylvania’s deadline to file for a voter-initiated recount. That blown deadline is a huge blow for Democrats who have pinned their hopes on recounts in the Keystone State, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“According to Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday, “the deadline for a voter-initiated recount was Monday, Nov. 21.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed Monday to begin a recount of the presidential election on Thursday but was sued by Green Party candidate Jill Stein after the agency declined to require county officials to recount the votes by hand.
It will be a race to finish the recount in time to meet a daunting federal deadline, and the lawsuit could delay the process. Under state law, the recount must begin this week as long as Stein or another candidate pays the $3.5 million estimated cost of the recount by Tuesday, election officials said.
Also Monday, Stein filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to force a recount there and her supporters began filing recount requests at the precinct level in the Keystone State. Stein — who received just a tiny piece of the national 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 of the 2.98 million statewide votes by machine or by hand, with dozens of counties expected to hand count the paper ballots. – JS
