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Secret Service might rent a floor in Trump Tower
Green Party files for Wisconsin recount, audit
Story highlights
- Experts alerted the Clinton campaign earlier this week to possible hacking in Wisconsin
- Green Party presidential hopeful Jill Stein has led efforts for an investigation
Washington (CNN)Green
Party officials filed Friday for a recount in Wisconsin, following
reports of voting discrepancies, and were seeking a deeper investigation
into the election results, which handed the state to Donald Trump two
weeks ago.
Wisconsin Green
Party co-chairman George Martin said that they were seeking a
"reconciliation of paper records" -- a request that would go one step
further than a simple recount, spurring, he said, an investigation into
the integrity of the state's voting system.
"This is a process, a first step to examine whether our electoral democracy is working," Martin said.
The
announcement came as Green Party candidate Jill Stein's Thanksgiving
fundraising blitz passed $5 million. The money is well beyond the $2
million mark the Green Party initially set, and Wisconsin party
officials said that any additional money not used for the recount would
be used to train Green Party candidates for local office. The goal as of
Friday was to raise $7 million.
"We
don't know, and we think the forensic computer experts have raised
serious questions. What we do know is that this was a hack-riddled
election, we saw hacks into voter databases, into party databases, into
individual email accounts. We know that there were attempts made broadly
on state voter databases and we know that we have an election system
that relies a computer system that is wide open to hacks," Stein told
CNN's John Berman Thursday. "It's extremely vulnerable, Americans
deserve to have confidence in our vote."
Late
Friday afternoon, the Wisconsin Elections Board said it had received
the petition from Stein and the Green Party and "is preparing to move
forward with a statewide recount of votes."
"We
have assembled an internal team to direct the recount, we have been in
close consultation with our county clerk partners, and have arranged for
legal representation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice," Wisconsin
Elections Board Administrator Michael Haas said. "We plan to hold a
teleconference meeting for county clerks next week and anticipate the
recount will begin late in the week after the Stein campaign has paid
the recount fee, which we are still calculating."
Hacking
experts alerted the Clinton campaign earlier this week it was possible,
based on voter low turnouts in some counties with electronic voting,
that voting systems might have been hacked. But nobody has presented any
evidence yet that they were tampered with.
Even
if Stein and others succeed in winning recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan
and Pennsylvania, it's unclear they would be enough to swing the
election from Trump to Hillary Clinton, with Trump holding leads as big
as more than 60,000 votes in Pennsylvania. When Florida officials
launched their recount in 2000, the margin was just 537 votes.
The
Clinton campaign has stayed out of the recount debate, which sprouted
up over the Thanksgiving holiday, even though it was a conference call
that election hacking experts had with her campaign staff which led to
the drive.
The Trump campaign and
his top advisers have dismissed the effort. Former Trump campaign
manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted on Thanksgiving that their opponents
were being sore losers.
"Look who
'can't accept the election results' Hillary Clinton Supporters Call for
Vote Recount in Battleground States," Conway wrote.
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