Jill Stein's Pennsylvania vote recount is complex, and underway
Jill Stein's Pennsylvania vote recount is complex, and underway
http://d3d3lnryymltzy5jb200.g00.sand...3D_$/$/$/$/$/$John Richard, left, checks in voters on Election Day at Jamestown Town Hall in Kieler, Wis., on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016. (Nicki Kohl/Telegraph Herald via AP)
By Luis Gomez Contact Reporter
A vote recount effort in Pennsylvania led by Green Party candidate Jill Stein is now underway, on the heels of another recount in Wisconsin, so we took a close look at how it would actually be done.
As of Monday morning, a small fraction of the more than 9,000 election districts in Pennsylvania had begun a recount petition process that was being described as a difficult undertaking given its detailed requirements and short deadlines.
Pennsylvania is different from Wisconsin where Stein met Friday’s deadline to file a statewide vote recount because candidates don’t file directly to petition a statewide recount in Pennsylvania. Instead, volunteer voters must sign and submit a recount petition in their individual county.
Stein posted a video on Facebook and a Google form that walks volunteers, step by step, through the recount petition process.
“Specifically that means we are going to jump through some hoops,” Stein said in the video. “This current system that needs to be democratized, that makes it very difficult for us to vote and for us to have confidence in our votes because of these very hack-friendly electronic machines that we use and a whole variety of circumstances.”
Observers are paying close attention to the recount effort, which the Hillary Clinton campaign has now joined and which Donald Trump publicly criticized over the weekend with tweets like these:
Stein’s campaign effort to launch vote recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan raised more than $5 million in less than one week — far more than the $3.5 million raised in her entire 2016 presidential campaign.
Calls for a vote recount or audit increased after one prominent University of Michigan computer science professor said it was more likely that “polls were systematically wrong” rather than hacked. News that Clinton’s popular vote surpassed that of Trump’s by more than two million votes also fueled reactions online.
Stein successfully filed a petition to recount votes in Wisconsin, which has begun the process this week, and another petition is expected to be filed in Michigan on Wednesday. But Pennsylvania’s recount petition process is expected to be an uphill battle.
Here are three basic things to know about the state’s recount effort.
1. How can a vote recount happen in Pennsylvania?
A statewide vote recount would automatically happen should a candidate win by 0.5 percent or less in an election. But because Donald Trump beat Clinton by more than 1 percent, no statewide recount is triggered. So a vote count challenge has to be done at the county level.
2. What are the requirements to challenge the vote count?
Three volunteer voters in each of Pennsylvania’s 9,163 election districts must sign and submit paperwork with their own county before the end of Monday. Because election districts there have different deadlines, some counties may be left out of the vote recount process.
3. How is a recount done in Pennsylvania?
Based on deadlines that have already passed in some counties, it’s unlikely all of the votes in the state will be counted. In those counties participating in a recount, each voting machine must be “opened and re-analyzed,” according to Billy Penn, a Philladelphia-based digital news site.
Stein’s recount effort and the entire post-election episode has stirred strong reactions from all sides, once again showing how divided the country remains. Many have said that a vote recount is unlikely to change the final electoral college vote count. Share your own thoughts about the recount with us below.
Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com
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