Almost a month after the election, Hillary Clinton supporters are still in a state of denial about the results and continuing to demand a recounts in three states. It’s not just the Democratic Party, the Green Party nominee Jill Stein has raised almost six million for recount efforts. Three states are under the microscope in regards to recounts, Michigan, a state that just turned red after almost 30 years, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, totaling forty-six electoral college votes, enough to give Clinton the presidency if the recount is in her favor.
Michigan, a typically blue state that the Clinton Camp and most political experts assumed would go to Clinton, actually had a more than ten thousand vote margin in Trump’s favor. The recount has yet to proceed in Michigan, only demands have been made in the state. In Wisconsin, the recounts have begun, but according to The Constitution, they will have to be concluded by thirty five days past the election. For Pennsylvania, the issue that arises with a recount is that Pennsylvania does all their ballots electronically, leaving no paper trail to count. Pennsylvania uses old school voting machines from the 1980’s to vote. A recount would be an extremely tedious and expensive task of going to every single machine and recounting the votes individually. The positive side of these machines is that they’re not connected to the internet, so a potential hacker would have to hack each voting machine individually to rig the election in Pennsylvania.
Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who is backing the recount efforts, says that the goal of this recount is not to get new results and she’s doubtful that Hillary Clinton will win because of these efforts. Stein says the result she would like to see from the recount is to increase the American people’s understanding of how corrupt the American voting and electoral college system is. Her target fundraising goal for this mission is nine and half million dollars.
The only desirable outcome is for Americans to understand how necessary it is to implement election and voting reform. If a candidate can win by a margin that’s coming up on two million votes and still not actually win the election, we need to change something about our system. The electoral college is antiquated and unnecessary for this day and age. It was made during a time when the government was worried that the common voting man was too uneducated to vote for the leader of The Executive Branch, which defeats the main point of a democracy.
If you’re wondering where Hillary Clinton is during all of this, she’s been keeping a low profile since election day. She’s only backed these efforts by making sure to have representatives at any legal proceedings regarding the election recount. If you’re wondering about Donald Trump, he’s also had his representatives there to fight against these proceedings on the grounds that it is money and time wasted, but neither side has much time left.
