“We deserve elections we can trust,” Stein said.

By Nadia Prupis / Common Dreams

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein on Wednesday called for a ballot recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and and Pennsylvania, and apparently took less than a day to raise more than her campaign’s initial goal of $2 million.

“After a divisive and painful presidential race, in which foreign agents hacked into party databases, private email servers, and voter databases in certain states, many Americans are wondering if our election results are reliable,” Stein said in a statement. “That’s why the unexpected results of the election and reported anomalies need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”

In total, the campaign raised $2.5 million in time to reach Wisconsin’s filing deadline of November 25 and fee of $1.1 million. The extra funds are enough to pay for Pennsylvania’s filing fee, and part of Michigan’s.

The total cost is estimated at $6-7 million, accounting for attorneys’ fees and recount observers, Stein’s campaign said.

The Boston Globe writes:

Recount rules vary by state, but generally states only cover costs for automatic recounts, or ones triggered when election results are within a specified, close margin.

Otherwise, the candidate or party that petitions the recount must first pay a deposit toward the cost of conducting the recount, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The deposit is refunded if the recount reverses the election results. If not, the petitioner has to pay for most of the costs associated with the recount.

Stein’s effort comes after a group of activists told New York magazine that Hillary Clinton—who lost the presidency despite winning the popular vote—should call for a recount in those three battleground states, alleging foreign hacking.

Her campaign manager, David Cobb, told the Globe, “The reason that we’re doing this is that we do not have confidence in the integrity of election results themselves,” adding that unused funds would go toward “election integrity efforts.”

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License