Clinton campaign to participate in vote recount in Wisconsin
Xinhua, November 27, 2016 Adjust font size:
The campaign of U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will participate in the vote recount in Wisconsin, her campaign attorney said Saturday.
"We feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself," Clinton's campaign attorney Mark Elias wrote on a online statement.
The statement said that since the election the campaign has received "hundreds of messages" that urged for action against the resutl, and that the campaign has previously conducted various measures to evaluate the fairness of the vote count but has found no "actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology."
In light of the findings, Clinton's campaign initially decided against filing for recount, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, it will join in, the statement said.
The Wisconsin recount was filed on Friday by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who said in an online video that she will also push for recounts in the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Elias said the Clinton campaign will also participate.
The three states where Stein has asked for recount were the most closely contested states during the presidential election, with Republican candidate Donald Trump's combined lead in all three states just topping 100,000 votes, according to figures released by state authorities.
Stein won approximately one percent of the vote in each of the three states, but local media has reported that she raised over five million U.S. dollars to finance her recount bid, which is 3.5 million dollars more than her campaign fund.
Clinton's campaign admitted that history is not on their side.
Clinton needs to overturn the result in all three states in order to bag enough electoral votes to replace Trump in the White House.
Trump announced victory in the presidential election on Nov. 9, after upsetting rival Clinton in several key states that were traditionally viewed as blue states, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The result sparked anger among thousands of Clinton supporters who staged mass protests across the country, and called for recounts. Enditem