Hillary
Clinton's campaign said Saturday it will take part in efforts to push
for recounts in several key states, joining with Green Party candidate
Jill Stein, who has raised millions of dollars to have votes counted
again in Wisconsin.
But, in a
post on Medium, Marc Elias, the campaign's counsel, said the campaign's
own investigation has not uncovered any evidence of hacking of voting
systems.
In
the campaign's most detailed comments to date on the recount, Elias
wrote that while the campaign was not going to contest the results
itself, it has decided now to take part in the effort to "ensure that it
is fair to all sides."
Green Party officials filed Friday for a recount in Wisconsin after reports of voting discrepancies.
Wisconsin
Green Party co-chairman George Martin said that the party was seeking a
"reconciliation of paper records" -- a request that would go one step
further than a simple recount and he hope would spur an investigation
into the integrity of the state's voting system.
"This is a process, a first step to examine whether our electoral democracy is working," Martin said.
Elias
said the campaign had been quietly investigating accusations for a
while and had received hundreds of requests that it do so.
"Because
we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside
attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise
this option ourselves, 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 wrote on Medium.
"If
Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in
Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those
states as well," he added.
In
addition to Donald Trump's total combined margin of victory in Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania being only about 107,000 votes, Elias said
concerns about Russia's interference in the election continue to raise
concerns.
"This election cycle was
unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the
campaign: the U.S. government concluded that Russian state actors were
behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the personal
email accounts of Hillary for America campaign officials, and just
yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government was
behind much of the "fake news" propaganda that circulated online in the
closing weeks of the election," he wrote.
The
campaign has met with lawyers, data scientists and analysts to asses
anomalies in the results that would suggest a hacked result. Private
meetings with outside experts involved sharing both groups concerns
about the data and findings.
Clinton's
team said they investigated every theory presented and examined laws
and practices pertaining to recounts, contests and audits.
"And
most importantly, we have monitored and staffed the post-election
canvasses -- where voting machine tapes are compared to poll-books,
provisional ballots are resolved, and all of the math is double checked
from election night," Elias said. "During that process, we have seen
Secretary Clinton's vote total grow, so that, today, her national
popular vote lead now exceeds more than 2 million votes."
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