Well, how about that. Jill Stein is demanding a recount of Wisconsin’s Presidential vote. Stein filed the demand about an hour before the deadline, after having raised more than $5 million for the effort. Let’s put this in perspective. According to OpenSecrets.org, a campaign finance watchdog, Jill Stein raised and spent about $3.5 million on her entire Presidential campaign up until October 28, 2016, about a week before the vote. But all of a sudden she managed to raise $5 million in record time to fund a recount in Wisconsin.
And lo and behold, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has announced that it is “participating” in the Wisconsin effort, to make sure that the process is “fair”. Clinton’s campaign also announced it will participate in Michigan and Pennsylvania recounts if a third party demands them. And what do you know, Jill Stein says she intends to do exactly that, provided she can raise the money. Which she very well may; after all she is fronting for Hillary Clinton.
Why else would Stein go through this charade, and why else would anybody contribute to the effort? There were about 2.8 million votes cast in Wisconsin. Trump beat Clinton by 1 percentage point. Stein got all of 30 thousand votes, about 1.1%; Gary Johnson got 106 thousand votes, about 3.6%. It is pretty much the same story in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump bested Clinton by a narrow 0.3 of a percentage point in Michigan, and by 1.2% percentage points in Pennsylvania. Stein’s vote was negligible, around 1% in each state. State by state results are available here.
But it just so happens that Mrs. Clinton needs the combined 46 electoral votes of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to snatch the election away from Donald Trump. Hope springs eternal, but it is simply not going to happen. Even the chief counsel for the Clinton campaign, Mark Elias, noted 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.” And for its part, the White House issued a statement to the New York Times saying that the election was free of interference; that from a cyber security standpoint, the “elections were free and fair.”
So there is virtually no prayer that the result is going to be overturned. But the very same left that was so aghast that Trump said he would wait to see the outcome before committing himself to it is in the process of trying to undermine those results with legal challenges that are otherwise pointless. And the Clinton campaign is, at the very least, providing a big assist.
Is anybody over 21 surprised? Nope.
JFB
