Marc Elias, the general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, announced on Saturday that they’ll participate in any ballot recounts. This comes the day after Green Party candidate Jill Stein requested a recount in Wisconsin, and she’s likely to request the same from Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Elias cautions that all this probably won’t lead to any plot twists.
“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,” he wrote in a blog post. He also mentioned that they hadn’t even found “actionable evidence” of hacking or the like.
The 2016 presidential election has easily been the most contentious in recent memory, and it somehow hasn’t ended yet. GOP nominee Donald Trump won enough electoral votes to clinch the victory, but Clinton, the Democratic candidate, has maintained a consistent lead in the popular vote since Nov. 8. The count currently stands at almost 2 million, as ballots continue getting counted.
That doesn’t matter, though, since Trump won just the right states. This included the swing state of Pennsylvania, and the formerly reliable blue states of Wisconsin and Michigan.
Even Stein’s spokespeople admit a recount isn’t certain. Here’s the disclaimer they put in their online appeal for donations to fund the requests. As of Saturday afternoon:
We cannot guarantee a recount will happen in any of these states we are targeting. We can only pledge we will demand recounts in those states.
So unless election officials turn up real evidence of election rigging, expect Trump to be the next President of the United States.
[Screengrab via A Katz and Shutterstock]
