Trump allies fight election recount 'mayhem' across Rust Belt
Michigan
attorney general sues as campaign groups fight Wisconsin recount and
Trump attorneys say Pennsylvania electors won’t be able to meet voting
deadline
Michigan’s
attorney general, Bill Schuette, said in a lawsuit that Jill Stein’s
recount request in the state was ‘dilatory and frivolous’ and would
waste millions of dollars. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP
Efforts to have the presidential election vote reviewed in states where Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton came under attack on Friday, as Trump allies asked courts to stop recounts in three states.
Legal submissions were made to authorities in Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin by Republicans who argued that recounts requested by Jill Stein, the Green party candidate, should not be allowed.
Michigan’s attorney general, Bill Schuette, said in a lawsuit that
Stein’s “dilatory and frivolous” recount would cost the public millions
of dollars, and could result in the state being unable to cast its votes
in the electoral college.
In Pennsylvania, attorneys for Trump accused Stein of “bringing mayhem”
to the election process despite “being no more than a blip on the
electoral radar” and having no evidence that the vote had been sabotaged
by foreign hackers.
Two pro-Trump campaign groups meanwhile asked a federal court in Madison, Wisconsin,
to bring a halt to an ongoing recount in the state, which was prompted
by a petition from Stein that was accepted by election authorities last
week.
Stein defended her push for recounts and pledged to not back down. “In
an election already tainted by suspicion, some coming from Donald Trump
himself, verifying the vote is a commonsense procedure that would put
all concerns around voter disenfranchisement to rest,” she said in a
statement.
The Green party candidate requested recounts in the three states on behalf of a coalition of election security experts, who were concerned that the electoral process could have been disrupted by foreign hackers.
They acted following warnings from US intelligence agencies during the
election campaign that Russian hackers were behind the thefts of emails
from Democratic party officials and had been detected intruding into the
voter registration systems of several American states.
Opponents to Stein’s efforts on Friday all pointed to the absence of any
clear evidence that the vote had been skewed by external forces. Trump
won slim victories over Clinton in all three states after Clinton had
led in opinion polls for several months.
According to the latest tallies compiled by state authorities, Trump won Michiganby 10,704 votes (0.2%), Pennsylvania by 46,765 (0.8%) and Wisconsin by 22,177 (0.7%).
Stein and her allies have suggested that hackers may have downloaded
state voter registration databases and filed bogus absentee ballots, or
tampered in some way with the electronic machines that register votes.
But they have not offered proof pointing to either theory.
The Obama administration has said it is confident that no cyber-hacking
interfered with election day and that the result was “the will of the
American people”. A group of Democratic senators has, however, asked the
president to declassify more information about Russia’s involvement in
the US election process.
The Republican efforts to derail Stein’s recounts raised a wide range of
objections on Friday. Schuette, the Michigan attorney general, homed in
on Michigan law holding that a candidate must show that she or he was
“aggrieved” by the result in order to prompt a recount.
“Stein has zero chance of winning Michigan’s electoral votes; she cited
no evidence of fraud or mistake in the canvass of votes; and she has
offered no argument as to how she is aggrieved by the electoral counts,”
Schuette, a Republican who supported Trump’s campaign for the
presidency, said in a lawsuit to a state appeals court.
Stein said in a statement that Schuette’s lawsuit was a “politically
motivated” attempt to prevent checks on the integrity of the vote count
in the state. Trump’s campaign itself filed a petition in Michigan on
Thursday in opposition to the recount.
In Pennsylvania, attorneys for Trump and the state Republican party
argued in a court filing that Stein’s efforts placed the state “at grave
risk” of not being able to meet a 13 December deadline for settling
disagreements before submitting results for the electoral college vote.
Stein’s request, according to the lawsuit, “has not alleged any specific
acts of fraud or tampering in Pennsylvania, much less that any such
fraud increased the votes of President-elect Trump, let alone to such
degree that it affected the outcome of the election.”
The Republicans also used Stein’s own filings against her. Stein asked
the state court to put her petition contesting the election on hold
pending the discovery by recounters of hacking. But state law bars such a
“fishing expedition”, the Republicans said.
In Wisconsin, the Great America Pac and Stop Hillary Pac cited the US
supreme court’s order to abandon recounts in Florida after the 2000
presidential election to argue that Wisconsin’s present recount violated
the equal protection clause of the US constitution.
They also said the recount could not be “accurately and carefully”
completed before the 13 December deadline for Wisconsin to settle
disagreements before presenting its vote for the electoral college. The
campaign groups asked the court to stop the recount “to prevent careless
mistakes” that would taint the election’s results and “cast a pall”
over Trump’s victory.
Michigan authorities were meeting on Friday morning to discuss Stein’s request and opposition from Trump and
the state attorney general. Recounting, which was due to begin on
Friday, has been placed on hold by the Michigan secretary of state.
