Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer announced plans to participate in vote recounts of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan if they take place, yet doesn’t expect to overturn the election of Donald Trump as president. If Green Party candidate Jill Stein initiates recounts in all of those states as she intends, the Clinton campaign “will participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” lawyer Marc Elias said Saturday in a post on the blogging website Medium.com.
The announcement prompted a sharp response from Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, now a senior adviser to the president-elect.
“What a pack of sore losers,” Conway said in a statement to Bloomberg. “After asking Mr. Trump and his team a million times on the trail, ‘Will HE accept the election results?’ it turns out Team Hillary and their new BFF Jill Stein can’t accept reality.”
“Rather than adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding and wishing the winner well, they’ve opted to waste millions of dollars and dismiss the democratic process. The people have spoken. Time to listen up. #YesYourPresident,” Conway said.
Stein says on her website that she’s raised more than $5.7 million for her recount effort so far, with a $7 million goal. The funds raised so far will cover costs in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The Democrat’s campaign didn’t plan to initiate recounts on its own because it hasn’t found “any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology,” Elias wrote.
Elias also isn’t expecting the recounts to erase what he said was a 107,000 combined vote margin separating the candidates in the three battleground states and overturning the election of Trump, who is due to be sworn in as president in January.
“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,“ Elias said. “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.”
Elias said there also is an obligation to the voters now that a recount is planned in Wisconsin and potentially the other two states. The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Friday said it had received Stein’s petition.
“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,” Elias said.
