WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (UPI) — Hillary Clinton‘s campaign announced on Saturday it will take part in an election recount in Wisconsin.
Marc Elias, the campaign’s general counsel, shared a statement on Mediumexplaining the campaign had not planned to call for a recount, but will participate in the recount initiated by Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
“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,” he said. “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.”
The call for a recount occurred after Clinton lost Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to President-elect Donald Trump by a total of 107,000 votes amid concerns the election results were hacked or altered to disadvantage Clinton.
Elias said a number of steps were taken to investigate any tampering of the results, although they did not yield any “actionable evidence” of hacking or other outside attempts at manipulation.
“The campaign is grateful to all those who have expended time and effort to investigate various claims of abnormalities and irregularities,” he said. “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.”
Stein submitted a formal request for the recount in Wisconsin on Friday after raising $5.3 million toward a $7 million goal in hopes of funding recounts in the three states in question.
Elias said it is “unfortunate” that Michigan does not conduct post-election audits using a sampling of precincts and acknowledged the number of votes separating Trump and Clinton in Michigan “well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount.”
“But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, 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,” he said
