Looks like Jill Stein has run out of cash. CBS’ Pittsburgh affiliate reports that the Green Party can’t raise the $1 million bond for the Pennsylvania recount, and has withdrawn their demand. And with that, the election is well and truly over: The Green Party is dropping its court case seeking a recount of Pennsylvania’s Nov. 8 presidential election. It had wanted to explore whether voting machines and systems had been hacked and the election result manipulated.
The Green Party’s filing came Saturday, saying it couldn’t afford the $1 million bond the court had set. A Commonwealth Court hearing had been scheduled in the case for Monday, and the $1 million bond was due later that day.
Pennsylvania was by far the toughest state for the recall, with a final gap of around 56,000 votes. There was no chance that a recount would even come within an order of magnitude of that gap, but the Stein campaign had insisted that the Keystone State still needed to do a hand recount of every ballot.
That ends the campaign. Without taking Pennsylvania off the Electoral College table, Trump can’t lose. Even if Stein manages to force the electors from Wisconsin and Michigan to miss the safe-harbor deadline and the Electoral College on December 19th by tying up both states in useless recounting, Trump still has 280 electors and a clear victory.
Even with that, though, Wisconsin looks like it’s well on its way to finishing its recount on time. Its Day 3 results show that almost a third of Wisconsin precincts have completed their recounts, accounting for over 705,000 of the 2.975 million ballots cast in the presidential race. The net change has been to find 349 additional votes. Trump has gained 138 votes and Hillary Clinton 126, which means that Trump has extended his lead by 12 points. That’s, er, not exactly what Stein promised donors who coughed up millions for this stupid and futile gesture.
Update: The court in Pennsylvania has put an exclamation point on the subject of recounts:
AND NOW, this 3rd day of December, 2016, Petitioners having filed a Praecipe to Discontinue and Withdraw the above-captioned matter, the hearing scheduled for Monday, December 5, 2016, at 10:00 a.m. is CANCELLED, and the Chief Clerk is directed to mark this matter CLOSED.
That’ll do it.
