Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, and independent party candidate Rocky De La Fuente, today filed for a recount of votes in the state of Wisconsin after Stein raised more than $5.2 million via NationBuilder.com to pursue “election integrity.”
Stein’s crowdfunding campaign raised donations after a group of legal and cybersecurity experts raised questions about voting results in three states, including Wisconsin, suggesting they theoretically could have been hacked or otherwise manipulated.
The group included attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman who is the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, New York Magazine reported.
The official Twitter account of the Wisconsin Elections Commission confirmed its receipt of the filing on Friday before the 5:00 p.m. ET deadline.
Stein’s campaign could not be immediately reached for comment. On behalf of the Green Party, she has said she intends to file for recounts in two other states as well, Pennsylvania and Michigan after Wisconsin.
Trump won in all three of these states by a narrow margin. In order to challenge the federal election results, if vote counts hold in all other states, recounts would have to prove Hillary Clinton the winner in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
It was preliminarily determined that Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania by 70,010 votes, in Michigan by 10,704 votes and in Wisconsin by 27,257 votes.
Wisconsin must now meet a deadline of completing a vote recount by December 13th in order for its votes to be counted at all, thanks to a federal safe harbor law.
U.S. elections are not ultimately determined by popular vote, of course, but by members of the Electoral College. They are set to meet on December 19th to issue final votes based on state-by-state contests.
Hillary Clinton has not made any statement about, or called for, a recount, officially.
Jill Stein is planning to answer questions about the recount campaign via a Facebook Live Q&A, but the time of that event has yet to be determined.
(The drama of it all makes me wonder why vote audits and recounts aren’t standard operating procedure after a federal election.)