White House, Clinton Clash Over Recount
While the popular vote is showing that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump in a landslide, Trump won the presidency due to the Electoral College. However, many speculated that Clinton would call for a recount—even though her campaign had kept mum on the subject.
Now, it seems that Clinton is going to ask for a recount thanks to the work of Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Stein has been raising money for a recount in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan where Trump beat Clinton by a total of 100,000 votes. Stein has said that she wants to ensure that the election wasn’t “hacked” by a foreign government such as Russia. As many know, Russia has been accused of interfering with the election and at times been suspected in the Democratic National Committee hack.
While Clinton is going to take part in the recount effort as noted by her campaign on Saturday, this is the complete opposite of what the White House wants. Barack Obama’s White House wants a smooth transition of power to President-elect Trump and probably wants to put a very messy election behind the country as best as possible.
As for Clinton’s campaign, they don’t seem hopeful that a recount will get them a different result but they planned on going through with it for their supporters.
“In the coming days, we will continue to perform our due diligence and actively follow all further activities that are to occur prior to the certification of any election results. For instance, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania conduct post-election audits using a sampling of precincts,” Clinton’s general counsel Marc Elias said in a blog post on Medium. “Michigan and many other states still do not. This is unfortunate; it is our strong belief that, in addition to an election canvass, every state should do this basic audit to ensure accuracy and public confidence in the election.”
Stein is already suing after Wisconsin refused to do a hand count of ballots and has already begun working on doing the legwork for the state of Pennsylvania’s recount. The Obama administration has stringently stood by the statement the election did not have any outside influence such as a foreign country hacking the voting systems.
“The federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day,” an Obama official said to Politico. “We believe our elections were free and fair from a cyber-security perspective.”
