| WASHINGTON
The Senate's top Republican broke with President-elect Donald Trump on Monday over whether Russian hacking during the U.S. election merited closer scrutiny, a fissure between Trump and his party that appeared to grow as lawmakers pressed for a special investigation into the matter.
The divide raised the possibility of enduring clashes between Trump and Republicans during his presidency over how to handle Russian President Vladimir Putin, a leader long viewed by many in the party as a calculating, untrustworthy foe but whom Trump has repeatedly praised for his leadership.
"The Russians are not our friends," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a news conference.
Calls on Sunday by two leading Republican foreign policy voices, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to investigate Russia's hacking were buoyed on Monday by McConnell, who said Russia's involvement needed further investigation.
"Any foreign breach of our cyber security measures is disturbing, and I strongly condemn any such efforts," McConnell said. "This simply cannot be a partisan issue."
McConnell said it "defies belief" that Republicans would be reluctant to investigate Russian actions.
McConnell's remarks contrasted with those of Trump and his staff, who scoffed at reports that the CIA had concluded the hacks and leaks of Democratic emails were carried out with the goal of helping Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump said the conclusion was "ridiculous."
Some lawmakers have called for a special committee to investigate the hacking, but McConnell did not back that idea, saying he has confidence in the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees. Cory Gardner, a Republican, said the Russian hacking reflected the need for a permanent committee dedicated to cyber security.
π
la times: Of course Donald Trump thinks it’s “ridiculous” to claim the Russians rigged the election for him.
Even if Vladimir Putin confessed to the crime on Russia Today, Trump would not believe it, because to do so is not in his nature. I do not want to shock the reader, but Trump has a very high opinion of himself and a tendency to reject evidence that contradicts that opinion, combined with an eagerness to find corroboration of his self-regard wherever possible. For instance, during the campaign he could never concede that online polls weren’t scientific, because the results of these polls confirmed that Trump was terrific, fabulous and tremendous.
So there was nothing shocking about Trump’s behavior over the weekend.
“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace asked, “According to the Washington Post, the CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help you win the presidency. Your reaction?”
Trump’s response:
“I think it's ridiculous. I think it's just another excuse. I don't believe it. I don't know why, and I think it's just — you know, they talked about all sorts of things. Every week, it's another excuse. We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the electoral college. I guess the final numbers are now at 306. …. No, I don't believe that at all. “
See? Wallace asked about a news report about a reported CIA finding and Trump heard, “You didn’t really win the elections because Russia.” (FYI, Trump’s electoral college victory ranks as the 46th biggest — out of 58).
The good news for Trump: No credible source has claimed that the Russians won the election for the Republican candidate. To believe that, you’d have to think that the Russians tricked Clinton into deploying her campaign resources disastrously, convinced her to set up her stealth server or encouraged her to give a lackluster performance on the campaign trail. How did the Russians get Clinton to ignore Wisconsin and Michigan, I wonder?
But countless credible sources have said that the Kremlin interfered with our election. Trump and his team are foolish and irresponsible to rain scorn on that. When the New York Times reported that the Russians also hacked the Republican National Committee’s servers — but didn’t leak the results — campaign aide Sean Spicer tweeted "Don't miss tomorrow's [David] Sanger New York Times exclusive interview with Elvis riding his unicorn on a rainbow with Santa."
The Times story is not nearly as dispositive as Democrats claim, but it is hardly the stuff of psychedelic fantasy.
The real debate is over whether the Russian meddling — which echoes similar meddling across Europe — was intended to get Trump elected or simply to erode confidence in the democratic process. I fail to see how this is an either/or choice. The hacking could have started with mere mischief in mind and evolved into a pro-Trump effort by the end. Most experts, including those on Trump’s team, didn’t expect to win (contrary to a lot of post-election spin), and it’s doubtful that Russia’s psephologists are that much better than ours. So the most likely goal for the Russians was to set up a defeated Trump to denounce the validity of the election and the integrity of the political process.
But then Trump won on the merits. The great irony is that the Democrats and the media — which not long ago were denouncing any suggestion that the system is rigged — are now echoing the very talking points Putin wants.
It’s a poisonous situation all around. Trump refuses to budge on his claim to a glorious, massive victory (or back off of his disturbing Putinphilia). Democrats — and much of the media — won’t grapple with the fact that Clinton lost fair and square, and they are in desperate pursuit of excuses to reject Trump’s legitimacy. Some are even working to give electors an intelligence briefing before they have to vote, presumably in an effort to overturn the election.
The only hope is that after Trump has been sworn in, both sides can revisit the issue of Putin’s clearly insidious agenda, without the specter of a “do-over” coloring everything people say — and everything Trump hears.
π
dw.com: Green Party-affiliated voters, spearheaded by leader Jill Stein (photo above), have dropped their efforts to have votes recounted in Pennsylvania, one of the key Rust Belt states claimed by President-elect Donald Trump in last month's presidential election.
In a court filing submitted Saturday, the voters who officially filed the case said they couldn't afford the $1-million (937,000-euro) bond required by the court.
Stein took to Twitter to criticize the process, calling it "odd" that Americans had to "jump through bureaucratic hoops" in order to trust the outcome of their election.
The Green Party's former presidential candidate plans to hold a rally in front of Trump Tower in New York on Monday, where she'll formally address the Pennsylvania recount.
Fight drags on
Some of Stein's supporters are still pursuing recounts in various districts across Pennsylvania, "The Washington Post" reported.
The bid in Pennsylvania was part of a larger effort by Stein and other members of the political left to challenge the results of the November 8 election, which was tainted by accusations of voter fraud and Russian hacking. Stein's team has vaguely cited "anomalies" as the basis for requesting the recount, and has raised nearly $7 million so far, according to her website.
Stein is also pursuing recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, two key states narrowly won by Trump. In all three states, the Green Party has come up against efforts by Trump's backers to halt the recount, with lawyers representing the president-elect saying there's no evidence justifying the request.
Trump's margin of victory in Pennsylvania was a scant 49,000 out of 6 million votes cast. Nonetheless, state and county officials have said they didn't expect the final result of the election to change.
πͺ
LA TIMES: The recount is officially on.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission said Tuesday that Green Party nominee Jill Stein has paid the nearly $3.5 million estimated cost to set into motion a statewide retabulation of the presidential vote.
Stein had asked for the recount after claiming that evidence of foreign interference existed. She is also seeking recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania; together, the three states carry enough electoral votes to flip the election from President-elect Donald Trump to Democrat Hillary Clinton, but such an outcome is all but impossible.
The Wisconsin recount, which starts Thursday, is likely to cost Stein slightly more, the commission said, blaming an earlier error in adding up cost estimates from the 72 county clerks who will oversee the ballot review. Stein will be charged whatever additional costs are incurred after the recount is concluded.
Officials on Monday said that most counties will complete their recount in a week but that more populous counties will face a challenge in meeting the deadline to certify results. The state aims to finish by Dec. 12, as state law gives the recount petitioner five days after the new tally is finished for further legal challenges.
Presidential electors in 50 states and the District of Columbia will meet Dec. 19 to formally cast the votes that will elect Trump as the next president.
π¦
the guardian: More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots.
Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine
Stein argued that Wisconsin’s plan to allow automatic recounting “risks tainting the recount process” because the electronic scanning equipment involved may incorrectly tally the results and could have been attacked by foreign hackers.
“There is a substantial possibility that recounting the ballots by hand will produce a more correct result and change the outcome of the election,” Stein argued in the lawsuit in Dane County circuit court. A copy was obtained by the Guardian.
Stein, the Green party’s presidential election candidate, is working to secure full recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump surprised pollsters by narrowly beating Clinton on his way to a national victory in the electoral college.
Stein, the Green party’s presidential election candidate, is working to secure full recounts in the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump surprised pollsters by narrowly beating Clinton on his way to a national victory in the electoral college.
A petition from Stein requesting a recount was accepted by Wisconsin last Friday. Her efforts to obtain a recount in Pennsylvania met serious difficulties on Mondayas it became clear she needed three voters in each of the state’s 9,163 voting precincts to request a recount on her behalf, and that deadlines to do so had passed in many precincts.
Wisconsin also told Stein on Monday that the recount, which was previously estimated to cost $1m, would actually cost $3.5m and that the funds must be produced by the end of Tuesday. Stein has raised more than $6m for the three-state recount effort using online crowdfunding.
The election took place amid warnings from the US government that Russian hackers had been detected in the voter registration systems of some states and were responsible for the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign
Stein’s effort to have votes recounted, which she is spearheading on behalf of a loose coalition of experts and activists, has been sharply criticized by Trump and his allies, as well as people from across the political spectrum. Late on Monday, however, a new group of academics came out in her support.
Professor Poorvi Vora of George Washington University said in an affidavit that hackers could have infected vote-scanning machinery in Wisconsin with malware designed to skew automatic recounts as well as the original vote count.
“It is not possible to determine with certainty the absence of malicious software hiding within what might appear to be many thousands of lines of legitimate software code,” said Vora, who added that the only way to ensure the integrity of the count was a recount by hand.
Wisconsin officials have said the recount must be completed by 8pm on 12 December in order for the results to be finally certified by the following day in time for a federal deadline. Fearful that hand recounts would take too long, the state’s election commission has told counties they may decide how they recount their ballots, prompting the lawsuit from Stein.
Arguing that a manual count of paper ballots was the only way to ensure there had been no outside interference, Professor Ronald Rivest of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology quoted the Russian proverb made famous by president Ronald Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”
“We have learned the hard way that almost any computer system can be broken into by a sufficiently determined, skillful, and persistent adversary,” said Rivest.
Professor Dan Wallach of Rice University said it was “entirely reasonable” to suspect that a foreign adversary was capable of a sophisticated and targeted attack on the American electoral process. “They know about battleground states,” he said.
Wallach cited the US-Israeli hacking of Iran’s nuclear program to argue against skeptics who insist that voter machines cannot have been hacked because they were not connected to the internet.
“The Stuxnet malware for example was engineered specifically to damage nuclear centrifuges in Iran even though those centrifuges were never connected to the internet,” said Wallach.
Other experts pointed to more prosaic reasons for holding a full recount by hand.
Professor Philip Stark, director of statistical computing at the University of California, Berkeley, said that Trump’s winning margin in Wisconsin of about 22,000 could “easily be less” than the errors frequently made by the optical voting systems used in most counties, which scan paper ballots marked by voters.
“To determine whether the reported winner actually won requires verifying the results as accurately as possible, which in turn requires manually examining the underlying paper records,” said Stark, who wrote a newspaper op-ed with Rivest calling for a review of the election before Stein announced her recount efforts.
The group who filed affidavits in support of Stein on Monday also included Douglas Jones, an associate professor at University of Iowa, and Harri Hursti, a Finnish expert on the hacking of electronic voter machines.
cbsnews: Last Updated Nov 30, 2016 4:33 PM EST
Green Party candidate Jill Stein formally filed for a recount in Michigan Wednesday, the third state on her list.
“After a presidential election tarnished by the use of outdated and unreliable machines and accusations of irregularities, people of all political persuasions are asking if our election results are reliable,” Stein said Wednesday. “We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system. We need to verify the vote in this and every election so that Americans can be sure we have a fair, secure and accurate voting system.”
Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson said in a statement Wednesday that it is “unusual” for a candidate that received such a small share of the vote -- Stein got just 1 percent in Michigan -- to request a recount, “especially when there is no evidence of hacking or fraud, or even a credible allegation of any tampering.”
President-elect Donald Trump won Michigan by a razor-thin margin, defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton there by just 10,704 votes (out of a total 4.8 million cast). The results were finally certified on Monday, almost three weeks after Election Day.
Stein has also already filed for a statewide recount in Wisconsin and a partial recount in Pennsylvania -- arguing that voting machine irregularities could have affected the final tallies in each state.
Recount rules and requirements are different in every state. The processes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the other states with pending recount efforts, show the rules governing them can be pretty complicated.
So here’s a look at how this process will work in Michigan, now that Stein has filed for a recount:
How much will it cost?
In Michigan, the cost of a recount is $125 per precinct. There are 6,300 precincts across the state, meaning a statewide recount would cost $787,500.
State election officials have suggested the real cost of the recount could be higher -- more like $900,000 -- but that additional cost would be the responsibility of the counties, not Stein’s campaign.
When will it start?
State elections officials have authorized the 19 largest counties in the state to begin a recount on Friday or Saturday and would continue through the weekend. Then, officials would move on to the surrounding counties. All ballots would be counted by hand in each county, with state elections officials supervising the process each step of the way.
State Elections Director Chris Thomas estimated that the full recount could be finished by Dec. 9 or 10, assuming there are no legal objections from other candidates or campaigns. If another candidate were to contest the recount, the process of counting the ballots would be put on hold until the Board of Canvassers can rule on the challenge.
However, should there be a challenge it would be difficult for Michigan to meet the Dec. 13 federal deadline for recounts to be completed. That’s just six days before the Electoral College votes, on Dec. 19, to formally elect the next president.
So Trump can contest the recount?
Yes, he can contest Michigan’s recount within seven days of the date when the recount is requested. Trump’s attorneys said Monday that they would contest a hand recount of the state’s ballots, and will instead propose a machine recount.
The Board of Canvassers would then hold a public meeting for Trump’s team to contest the recount, and would rule on whether to continue or stop the recount after that point. (If the board’s six members are deadlocked on the issue, the recount would begin two business days later, Thomas said, according to the Detroit News.)
Will a recount change the outcome?
It’s very unlikely. Though Michigan is the closest margin between Trump and Clinton, it’s still incredibly rare for a recount to change the overall result of a race -- and a 10,000-vote margin is not easy to overcome.
Stein is seeking recounts in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. If the three states were to move into Clinton’s column, she would win the Electoral College with 278 electoral votes -- but again, this is exceedingly unlikely.
Michigan, worth 16 electoral votes, has never held a presidential recount, but the effort isn’t without precedent. In 2004, the Green Party did succeed in obtaining a recount in Ohio in the presidential race. The New York Times noted at the time that the statewide recount of Ohio’s 88 counties resulted in a net difference of 285 votes, meaning that George W. Bush beat John Kerry in Ohio by 118,457 votes, instead of 118,775. The recount concluded on Dec. 28, 2004, nearly two months after the election took place.
newsweek: President-elect Donald Trump went on a tweetstorm Sunday morning, quoting Hillary Clinton’s debate promise to accept the election results a day after her campaign agreed to support efforts to recount votes in Wisconsin, an effort his transition team labeled a “scam.”
Razor-thin margins in key battleground states delivered the election for Trump, who stands at 290 electoral votes despite Clinton’s nearly 2-million-vote edge in the popular vote.
Last week, a group of election lawyers and computer scientists urged the Clinton campaign to ask for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where anomalies indicated either benign problems with voting machines or possible tampering or fraud. In some Wisconsin counties, for example, more votes were recorded than there were registered voters.
The Clinton camp initially expressed no interest in a recount. The Obama White House also indicated that the country should accept the results of the election and move on. But Green Party candidate Jill Stein raised enough money last week to request recounts, and met the Friday deadline in Wisconsin to petition for one. She intends to file for recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania this week, and Clinton's campaign counsel says they'll support those efforts.
Newsweek talked to veteran voting rights attorney John Bonifaz, founder of the National Voting Rights Institute, who has been advising the recount effort. He was lead counsel in the Ohio 2004 recount on behalf of both the Libertarian and the Green parties, and he has been engaged in democracy advocacy work for more than two decades. He was in Florida during the recount effort in the 2000 presidential election, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount and George W. Bush was elected despite having lost the popular vote, like Trump.
Q: Is this just a partisan effort to challenge President-elect Trump?
A: It is a false narrative that this is a partisan effort. The nonpartisan election integrity community has been engaged for many, many years dealing with issues around the integrity of the process of how we count votes and the question of who gets to vote. These are all questions having to do with democracy on a small “d” level, not a partisan level.
My experience is that once the election is over and projections are made, the partisans walk off the stage. They don't stick around to look at the anomalies. It’s up to the integrity community to make the case if necessary. We shouldn't necessarily accept the machine tally on election night. The work primarily is around proving our voting systems are verifiable and trustworthy.
There has been a major effort in California to engage in a full review of voting systems, and California determined, after bringing in leading computer scientists from around the country, that electronic voting systems are so unreliable that they would ban them. Those systems are still in use in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
A lot of people have pushed for mandatory audits and until you have them, recounts are the only way to engage in investigative work. In a functioning democracy, we can double-check. When you fly a plane, you double-check, when you audit banks, you double-check.
Q: What is the overall strategy?
A: The Wisconsin recount has been filed. Michigan will be filed Wednesday, and Pennsylvania requires voters to petition their county precincts. A number of voters will come forward with those filings before the deadline on Monday. We will know in the course of the next two weeks what issues are emerging. If officials say we are just going to push the button on the machines again, that will not be sufficient. If you don’t take representative samples and match the paper ballots to the machines, the paper ballots aren’t worth a grain of salt.
Q: What facts are you basing your requests in each state on?
A: You have to have a good basis in asking for recount. Stein had an affidavit from a leading computer scientist. The argument is that we should review the paper ballots in the counties in Wisconsin where voters use paper-ballot based systems and that we should examine the electronic voting machines, in use in other Wisconsin counties, which have been proven to be untrustworthy. In Michigan, Trump won by 11,000 votes. But there were 85,000 “blank votes” in which people voted for other races but they left the presidential race blank. That is far higher than any election in history. A hand count of the ballots could determine if the box was merely checked, but the oval not filled in. If so, it will be counted. This can make a difference in the outcome. In Minnesota in 2008, Sen. Al Franken won entirely on a recount of paper ballots. The machine count had declared Norm Coleman a winner, but the hand counting showed Franken was the actual winner.
Q: What happens if the requests are all granted in three states and tallies differ from the results on election night?
A: If the tallies of the recount differ from the results on election night, the state must go with the tallies from the recount. If discrepancies are shown, it will open the door to further investigation. There will have be a forensic examination of machines. There will be likely litigation. Another issue, which came up in Bush v. Gore, is what happens if we are still counting votes by December 13, the date on which the Electoral College has to be counted. It is anybody’s guess what will happen. Bush v. Gore is not precedent for any other case, and I think we would argue that we should keep counting.
Q: What exactly is the process of the recount?
A: All the candidates are offered an opportunity to observe the recount. If they see anything they don't agree with, a stray mark that wasn’t intended to be a vote, for example, they can litigate that. I would be surprised if the Trump campaign doesn't show up. Wisconsin starts as early as this week. It is a localized process; recounts take place in local jurisdictions and local officials have different standards from each other. In Ohio, in 2004, we found resistance from some officials and assistance from others. I would not be surprised if there is resistance from officials this time, as well. It will be a teaching moment for the American public that in a functioning democracy, we should verify the vote.
Q: So, does this wind up in the Supreme Court?
A: Well, it is important to note that we have a 4 to 4 court, so, if there is a tie vote at the Supreme Court, the court that has the authority on this is the federal appeals court hearing the case. If the recount is not finished before December 13, a court might have to rule. And it is possible that a federal appeals court with jurisdiction in Wisconsin will allow a recount to continue, while a federal appeals court with jurisdiction in Pennsylvania denies it. It’s a complicated situation when you don't have a nine- person Supreme Court.
reuters: Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign will take part in a recount of Wisconsin votes in the U.S. presidential race, an effort Republican winner Donald Trump called "ridiculous" on Saturday.
Wisconsin's election board on Friday approved the recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein. She has said she wants to guarantee the integrity of the U.S. voting system since computer hacking had marked the Nov. 8 election.
Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign counsel, said the campaign would take part in the recount in Wisconsin as well as in the other battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan if recounts were mounted there.
Elias said in a statement on the Medium website that the Clinton campaign had not planned to seek a recount since its own investigation had failed to turn up any sign of hacking of voting systems.
"But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides," Elias said.
Clinton's campaign should be legally represented in Wisconsin to be able to monitor the recount, he said.
In a statement, Trump said the three states had been won by wide margins, including by more than 70,000 votes in Pennsylvania. The recount is a "scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded," he said.
The $7 million Stein has sought to raise for the recounts is a way "to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount," he said.
Although Trump won the Electoral College tally, Clinton will have won the national popular vote by more than 2 million ballots when the final results are in.
Stein has raised $5.8 million of the $7 million needed to cover fees and legal costs for the three recounts, according to her campaign website. The deadline for filing a recount bid in Pennsylvania is Monday.
The voting margins make it highly unlikely any recounts would end up giving Clinton a win in all three states, which would be needed for the overall election result to change.
Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania by 70,010 votes, in Michigan by 10,704 votes and in Wisconsin by 27,257 votes.
Experts urged extra scrutiny of the three states, Stein told CNN on Friday, because their voting systems were seen as vulnerable.
(Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
the guardian: In two days, Jill Stein raised more than enough money, more than $5m, to file for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, though her campaign is still seeking about $2m more to cover the associated legal fees.Results in these battleground states were narrow, with Trump winning by just 0.3% in Michigan, 1.2% in Pennsylvania, and 0.7% in Wisconsin. If Clinton had won all of these states’ 46 electoral college votes, it have would been enough for her to win the presidency.
But the recount process is intensive, expensive and unlikely to change the outcome of the election unless widespread voter fraud is proven. Experts have been skeptical that is the case.
In Wisconsin – where her team was due to file a recount motion by Friday afternoon – election officials would have to examine millions of paper ballots and the paper trails of the 5% of votes cast on electronic touch-screen machines.
Wisconsin election commission director Michael Haas told local news that the commission was preparing for a recount, though it had not seen evidence of interference in the state’s voting system. “We don’t have any reason to suspect that any voting equipment has been tampered with,” Haas said.
Unofficial results showed Trump won Wisconsin by more than 27,000 votes. The state has never conducted a presidential recount, but Stein’s campaign said it would file a motion for a recount on Friday before the deadline to do so in the state.
In Pennsylvania, there is no paper trail – a problem election observers anticipated ahead of the 8 November race. “The nightmare scenario would be if Pennsylvania decides the election and it is very close. You would have no paper records to do a recount,” Lawrence Norden, the co-author of a report on voting machines, told the Los Angeles Times in late October.
But because machines there are not connected to the internet, like those in Michigan, officials said they couldn’t be hacked.
Across the whole of the US, about three-quarters of voters mark paper ballots that are counted electronically by an optical scanner, according to the nonpartisan group Verified Voting, which examines how new technology affects voting integrity. But some states, including Pennsylvania, rely almost entirely on touchscreen computer voting that does not produce a paper trail. The punch card ballots that resulted in the disputed hanging chads during the Florida recount in 2000 are no longer used.
Trump was declared the winner in Michigan on Thursday by 10,704 votes, and the election director there insists there was no evidence of hacking. “It’s just conjecture, and I don’t think that serves anyone’s good purpose,” said Chris Thomas, the longtime director of Michigan’s Bureau of Elections.
