GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) – An attorney for Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign says it will participate in the Wisconsin recount started by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Marc Elias posted to Medium on Saturday, saying they will also pursue recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two other battleground states that Stein was raising money to file recounts.
Stein has said she wants to make sure hackers didn’t skew the results in those swing states. However, the Green Party does not have any evidence of hacking.
Clinton’s campaign says they didn’t plan to file a recount themselves because they couldn’t find evidence of hacking, but since Stein filed a recount, they decided to participate.
“Regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states,” Elias said, “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.
“The campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities. While that effort has not, in our view, resulted in evidence of manipulation of results, now that a recount is underway, we believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported.”
Regarding the election, a senior White House administration official told ABC News there did not appear to be any malicious activity by cyber actors.
“The Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting out electoral process on election day,” the official said. “As we have noted before, we remained confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out on election day. As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”
The results in all three states were close between Republican Donald Trump and Clinton. According to the Wisconsin Election Commission, Clinton received 1,381,823 votes in Wisconsin, compared to Trump’s 1,404,000 votes. Stein, who has no chance of winning, finished fourth in Wisconsin with 31,006 votes.
In their reasoning for supporting a recount, Clinton’s campaign cited a Washington Post report that said a Russian propaganda effort involving fake news stories may have helped Trump be elected as president. Researchers found the stories were viewed more than 200 million times. The stories were aimed at hurting Clinton, according to the report.
Russian state actors were also behind hacks to the Democratic National Committee.
Trump called the recount a “scam” by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded.
“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount,” Trump said in a statement. “All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.”
Trump said the results of the election should be respected, not challenged.
Wisconsin state officials say a recount will start late next week. The state is working under a federal deadline of December 13 to complete the recount.