First and foremost, there is the Wisconsin recount scheduled to begin soon. Despite a clear statement from Marc Elias, many seem to misunderstand the Clinton campaign's position.
We are getting attacked for participating in a recount that we didn't ask for by the man who won election but thinks there was massive fraud
Clearly,
Hillary and her campaign have not questioned the election result and
are observing the recount process as they as well as Trump's camp should
- especially since he appears to have a problem with the results.
“In
addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the
popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” — President-elect Donald Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 27
Angered
by demands for a recount in the three states that gave him an electoral
college victory, President-elect Donald Trump made a bold but
unsubstantiated assertion in a tweet — that “millions of people” voted
illegally in the presidential election. He suggested they voted for his
Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who now leads in the popular vote by
2.2 million votes, and thus he actually also won the popular vote.
Winning
the electoral college is all that counts in the presidential race. But
losing the popular vote by such a substantial margin apparently gnaws at Trump. Is there any basis for his claim?
Hillary Clinton’s kept an understandably low profile since losing the election to Donald Trump. Her campaign team will join in recount efforts
in every state where a petition is successfully filed by Jill Stein.
However, Clinton will likely distance herself from these efforts and
maintain her current routine of shying away from the limelight unless
someone happens to catch her in dog-walking mode.
This provides a nice transition for Clinton’s first post-election
follow on Twitter, and those honors go to none other than Snoop Dogg.
Writer Stefan Becket nabbed some screenshot evidence.
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.
First,
since the day after the election we have had lawyers and data
scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that
would suggest a hacked result. These have included analysts both from
within the campaign and outside, with backgrounds in politics,
technology and academia.
Second,
we have had numerous meetings and calls with various outside experts to
hear their concerns and to discuss and review their data and findings.
As a part of this, we have also shared out data and findings with them.
Most of those discussions have remained private, while at least one has
unfortunately been the subject of leaks.
Third,
we have attempted to systematically catalogue and investigate every
theory that has been presented to us within our ability to do so.
Fourth, we have examined the laws and practices as they pertain to recounts, contests and audits.
Fifth,
and most importantly, we have monitored and staffed the post-election
canvasses — where voting machine tapes are compared to poll-books,
provisional ballots are resolved, and all of the math is double checked
from election night. During that process, we have seen Secretary
Clinton’s vote total grow, so that, today, her national popular vote
lead now exceeds more than 2 million votes.
In
the coming days, we will continue to perform our due diligence and
actively follow all further activities that are to occur prior to the
certification of any election results. For instance, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
conduct post-election audits using a sampling of precincts. Michigan
and many other states still do not. This is unfortunate; it is our
strong belief that, in addition to an election canvass, every state
should do this basic audit to ensure accuracy and public confidence in
the election.
Beyond
the post-election audit, Green Party candidate Jill Stein announced
Friday that she will exercise her right as a candidate to pursue a
recount in the state of Wisconsin. She has indicated plans to also seek
recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Because
we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside
attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise
this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in
Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process
proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides.
If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts
in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those
states as well. We do so fully aware 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. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of
the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our
campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented
on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.
The
campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to
investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities. While
that effort has not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation
of results, now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an
obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for
Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an
accurate vote count will be reported.
