Presidential recount efforts hit court roadblocks
A long-shot effort by Jill Stein to recount presidential election votes in three states took a big hit in a court on Wednesday, with another possible blow coming on Friday.
The Green Party presidential candidate wants recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states whose combined electoral votes swung the November 8 election to Republican candidate Donald Trump. Wisconsin is in the process of doing a recount, but Stein’s efforts were contested in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And on Wednesday, federal court Judge Mark A. Goldsmith, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, effectively ended the recount effort in Michigan, unless a higher appeals court or even the Supreme Court feels otherwise.
Michigan Republicans went to a state court to argue that Stein wasn’t entitled to a recount because she wasn’t close to winning the presidential race in Michigan. The state court agreed, and then the federal district court upheld the state court decision.
Goldsmith sympathized with the generalized concerns voiced by Stein about the vulnerability of modern voting systems to potential security problems. But he also pointed out there was no evidence presented to show specific instances of hacking or vote tampering.
“Invoking a court’s aid to remedy that problem in the manner plaintiffs have chosen — seeking a recount as an audit of the election to test whether the vulnerability led to actual compromise of the voting system — has never been endorsed by any court and would require, at a minimum, evidence of significant fraud or mistake — and not speculative fear of them. Such evidence has not been presented here,” Goldsmith said.
With a December 13 deadline looming over all three possible recounts, political observers believe Goldsmith’s decision to stop to any Michigan recount effectively ends that process in the state, barring an unforeseen event in a higher appeals court. Stein’s lawyers said they would appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court.
And on Friday, Stein and her attorneys have a court date in Philadelphia. Stein has appealed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to intercede in her attempted Pennsylvania recount.
Stein wants federal judge Paul S. Diamond to order a recount of the Pennsylvania’s paper ballots and conduct a forensic examination of the electronic voting machines. The lawsuit, as in Michigan, doesn’t appear to present any eyewitness evidence of machine tampering. Instead, it alleges that Pennsylvania’s “antiquated and fundamentally unfair election laws” violate the First and 14th Amendment rights of the state’s voters in the situation of a vote recount.
If Stein hits the same roadblocks in Pennsylvania federal court as she did in Michigan, the effectiveness of any recount effort to influence the 2016 presidential election is greatly diminished.
Currently, Trump has 306 electoral votes, compared with 232 votes for Hillary Clinton. A winning candidate needs 270 votes, and Trump would need to lose recounts in all three states to lose the election. (Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes, Michigan has 16 votes and Wisconsin has 10 votes.)
And even in Wisconsin, where a recount effort is underway, there has been little change in the vote count so far. Trump won that state by about 22,000 votes and Clinton has picked up 85 votes with 70 percent of the recount completed. Trump has leads of about 11,000 in Michigan and 44,000 in Pennsylvania.
Unless there is an unlikely court decision or decisions by next Tuesday, any recount process would need to be completed by then. Under federal safe harbor provisions, the states and the District of Columbia must determine their electors by December 13, or six days before the Electoral College members meet in person on December 19. This was the critical deadline back in 2000 that halted the Florida recount in the Bush-Gore election dispute.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
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