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12/1/16

Recounts 'grasping at straws'

Election officials across this country generally agree the recount of votes in the Nov. 8 presidential election in three states is a complete waste of time and money. The New Yorker magazine calls it “The Recount to Nowhere” in a Monday piece by Amy Davidson.

“The sole item it may deliver,” Davidson said, “is the one thing the country had been spared with (Donald) Trump’s victory: a corrosive, conspiracy-minded and slanderous attack on the integrity of our voting system.”

Davidson chides the behavior of everyone involved in the recount story, including the Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party and Trump. She said Stein’s effort to seek recounts is frustrating, Clinton and her party’s involvement is disappointing and Trump’s allegations that millions of votes were cast fraudulently hurts the credibility of the state-operated election systems.

Trump watchers said they weren’t surprised about the president-elect’s Sunday night tweets saying many popular votes were fraudulent. They said he conjured up the unverified accusation because he can’t stand to lose at anything. Trump won more than the necessary electoral votes, but Clinton leads him by two million in popular votes.

The Obama administration said it has seen no evidence of hackers tampering with the 2016 election results.

“We stand behind our election results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people,” a senior administration official told Politico late Friday.

A Clinton spokesman said independent experts had briefed the campaign but ultimately found no “actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology,” but they would still join the recount effort.

Tom Schedler, Louisiana’s secretary of state and elections chief, has been a constant defender of his state’s election system and others across the country.

Schedler in July blasted remarks by Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser who accused state Democrats of busing in voters during early voting periods. Nungesser said they didn’t even have to be taken to their precincts to vote. Schedler called that an irresponsible comment attacking the credibility of registrars, clerks of court and others who handle state elections.

In September, Schedler told the national Election Assistance Commission, “I want to assure you that the integrity of elections across our country is solid,” “One of my concerns and that of many of my colleagues, if not all, is that the rhetoric around the potential hacking of our elections this November is causing a lot of angst to all of us.”

Trump has 306 electoral votes to 232 for Clinton. It takes 270 electoral votes to win. Stein plans to seek recounts in Michigan (16 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (20 votes) and Wisconsin (10 votes). A recount would have to reverse the vote in all three of those states, an unlikely outcome, to get Clinton to 278.

Davidson of The New Yorker noted that Jill Stein won enough votes in Michigan and Wisconsin to account for Clinton’s losses there.

Stein suffered a setback when the Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed to begin a recount but declined to require county officials to recount the votes by hand. Stein filed suit, but it was dismissed.

Elections Commission chairman Mark Thomsen, a Democrat, said a 2011 statewide recount changed only 300 votes out of 1.5 million. Thomsen was particularly upset with Trump for his allegations of illegal voting, calling them “an insult to the people that run our elections.”

USA Today reported the recount request in Michigan goes to the Board of State Canvassers and Trump can challenge the request. The newspaper said the requirements in Pennsylvania are even more complicated. In fact, it said, at least one election official said the deadline for a voter-initiated recount there had already passed and there are no paper ballots or receipts to look at in a recount.

Pennsylvania’s top election official told The Inquirer of Philadelphia there was “no evidence whatsoever” of voting irregularities. The newspaper said Stein had raised $6.2 million, covering the cost of recounts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and was close to her goal of $7 million to also cover recount costs in Michigan.

Davidson calls the recount effort “classic conspiracy logic: the absence of evidence is evidence of just how insidious it is. The failure of an event to turn out as expected is presented as evidence of some hidden hand at work, some deliberate interference. But did something go wrong in 2012, when Obama beat the polls expectations?…”

Democrats have better things to do, Davidson said. She said Trump’s transition presents “all sorts of tasks and challenges for his opponents.” Among those tasks she mentions are confirmation fights against some of his Cabinet nominees and his Supreme Court choices.

The U.S. edition of the British newspaper The Guardian said recounts were held for only 27 of the 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2015. Of those 27, just three changed the final outcome and none of them were presidential elections, according to Fair Vote, a nonpartisan election research group.

The median swing between the top two candidates in all those elections has been just 219 votes, the newspaper said. In Wisconsin, Trump won 27,257 more votes than Clinton; in Pennsylvania he won by 69,236 votes; and in Michigan he won by 11,612.

As The New Yorker reported, this definitely sounds like, “The Recount Road to Nowhere.”




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