How did this start?
Following Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the presidential election, voter security experts began privately discussing their concerns about whether the results might have been tampered with, according to John Bonifaz, the founder of the National Voting Rights Institute.
The election had taken place against a backdrop of warnings from the US government that Russian hackers were “scanning and probing” the election systems of American states, and were behind the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Eight days before the election, the White House had used an emergency hotline to warn Russia against further interference.
“I was getting calls from members of the election integrity community, so I joined them and began looking at possible discrepancies myself,” Bonifaz said in an interview.
Several concerns emerged. Trump appeared to have performed particularly well in Wisconsin counties only using electronic voting. There seemed to have been a sharp increase in the number of ballots cast in Michigan that left the presidential field blank. Electronic voting systems had briefly faltered in one North Carolina county on election day.
The group began hearing from Democratic-leaning activists and liberal writers convinced that Trump’s victory required further scrutiny. Increasingly dismayed as Clinton’s lead over Trump in the nationwide popular vote grew to more than two million, they were sharing apparent anomalies in the results online using the hashtag #AuditTheVote.
It was decided that this loose coalition would push for a full audit or recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – three states critical to Trump’s electoral college win that pollsters had previously thought safe for Clinton. To do this, they needed to persuade one of the candidates who was actually on the presidential ballot to ask state authorities to review the results.
What evidence is there of voter fraud?
Though most agree that voter fraud is possible, experts disagree about its extent in the 2016 presidential election. J Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science of the University of Michigan, has been one of the leading voices claiming that there is sufficient evidence of fraud to justify a recount. Halderman provided an affidavit in the formal petition for a Wisconsin recount in which he said “one explanation for the results of the 2016 presidential election is that cyberattacks influenced the result”. Halderman elaborated on his views in a Medium post published on Saturday: “America’s voting machines have serious cybersecurity problems.”
Other experts have taken a more cautious view. Writing about a possible recount in USA Today on 18 November, Ron Rivest and Philip Stark, both advisers on the US Election Assistance Commission, said: “While there is, as yet, no compelling evidence, the news about hacking and deliberate interference makes it worth finding out.”
Polling suggests that most of the American public accepts the vote results. A total of 18% said that they did not believe Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2016 election, according to a survey published by the Washington Post and ABC News on 13 November. The poll, which was based on the responses of only 865 adults, found that the view was most common among Clinton supporters (33% of whom said the result was not legitimate) and least common among Trump supporters (just 1% of whom said that Trump was not the legitimate winner).
Those numbers suggest a reversal of attitudes prior to voting day when many Trump supporters were claiming that the election would be rigged. There were more than 600,000 allegations of vote rigging in the two weeks to 2 November, according to analysis by the thinktank Demos for Mashable. The accounts associated with those tweets were largely either Trump supporters or conspiracy theorists, according to Demos. On 9 November, claims of vote rigging fell by almost 90%.
What does Jill Stein say about it?
Stein, the Green party’s candidate for president, agreed to spearhead the effort to secure recounts following requests from Bonifaz and the security experts. Having been reluctant initially due to financial concerns, Stein was persuaded that the cost could be met via crowdfunding. On Wednesday, the Guardian first reported that she had decided to act.
“This was all driven by the nonpartisan election integrity community,” said Bonifaz, who has been frustrated by some critics accusing Stein of trying to cash in on disappointment about the election result. “I’m the one who asked Jill Stein to file these petitions.”
Stein said she was acting on “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities. “In an election surrounded by hacks, the use of systems that have been demonstrated to be easily hacked should concern every American,” she said.
In her petition to Wisconsin, a copy of which was first obtained by the Guardian, Stein chose to focus on an apparent “significant increase” in the number of absentee ballots cast in Wisconsin. She suggested, without direct evidence, that hackers could have downloaded the state’s voter registration database and used this to file bogus absentee votes.
What does Hillary Clinton say about it?
Clinton has said nothing publicly. Her campaign was approached by Bonifaz and his coalition earlier this month, and listened during a conference call as election experts laid out their various concerns. But the campaign gave no official response on whether they would request recounts, leaving Bonifaz and his allies to turn to Stein and the Green party.
Once Stein had filed her petition in Wisconsin, Clinton’s most senior campaign attorney, Marc Elias, said in an online post that the campaign would participate in the recounts “in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides”. To Elias’s frustration, this was interpreted by Trump as Clinton joining Stein in casting doubt over the results.
In fact, Elias stressed in his post that the Clinton campaign’s experts had been poring over the results since election day “to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states” – and had so far “not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology”.
Instead, the Clinton campaign was saying that it would not stand in the way of recount efforts that were already under way. “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,” said Elias.
What does Donald Trump say about it?
Having remained relatively quiet over Thanksgiving about Stein’s actions, Trump’s team was enraged by the Clinton campaign’s intervention. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s senior adviser and former campaign manager, said on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday that Clinton’s camp was being “a bunch of crybabies and sore losers about an election that they can’t turn around”.
Trump later posted a string of statements to Twitter dismissing the recount effort. “Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in,” he said. “Nothing will change.”
He attacked Clinton’s camp for appearing to question the integrity of the result after being so sharply critical of his own claims during the campaign that the election would be “rigged” against him. According to two people involved in the recount effort, it was precisely this vulnerability to claims of hypocrisy that led several senior members of Clinton’s team to want to avoid getting involved.
Trump concluded his rant with outlandish claims, with no basis in evidence, that he had only lost the popular vote to Clinton because “millions” of people had voted illegally. He also falsely stated that “serious voter fraud” had been detected in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – all states that Clinton won.
Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, rejected Trump’s allegation, which he described as absurd and unsubstantiated. “His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect,” said Padilla.
How much will it cost?
The recount effort has so far raised $6.3m of its $7m funding goal. That budget is based on estimates of filing fees ($1.1m in Wisconsin, $0.5m in Pennsylvania and $0.6m in Michigan) plus an estimated $2m-$3m in attorney’s fees as well as the money required to hire recount observers across all three states.
But the fundraising goal wasn’t always $7m. When Stein first launched the campaign on 23 November, the fundraising goal was $2.5m, in part because attorney fees were initially estimated to be $1m. Just 12 hours later, the goal was revised up to $4.5m and by 25 November it was raised again to its current level of $7m.
Perhaps that is not surprising – vote recount costs are hard to estimate. There are numerous factors that affect the cost, in part because different state laws require different procedures for vote recounts. The Wisconsin election commission has said it is still calculating the fee that it will charge the Stein campaign before beginning the recount. In 2011, Wisconsin held a statewide recount of the supreme court election, which the Associated Press estimated cost approximately $520,000. Twice as many votes were cast in this year’s presidential race.
Bonifaz said the coalition had retained the New York law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, which has extensive experience in election disputes and had advised organizers to budget $7m for the effort.
“This is going to be a very costly campaign,” said Bonifaz, adding that the average contribution from the tens of thousands of supporters who had donated was about $42. “But it is something that a lot of people clearly want.”
Has this happened before?
Statewide vote recounts are relatively common; 25 took place between 1980 and 2010, but it’s more rare for them to take place in presidential elections. Many will remember the 2000 presidential election when questions over the crucial Florida vote meant that George W Bush’s presidential victory over Al Gore was genuinely in doubt for weeks. But there were similar instances in 1876, 1884, 1916 and 1960 of the race not being settled on election night, according to Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University.
Though federal law requires states to choose electors six days before the electoral college members meet in person (this year, that deadline is 13 December) and the US Electoral Commission publishes a how-to guide on vote recounts, the reality is still complicated. Only six of the 15 current potential swing states automatically require a recount based on a close margin: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Will it make a difference?
Recounts were only held for 27 of the 4,687 statewide general elections between 2000 and 2015. Of those 27, just three changed the final outcome (all in favor of the Democrats), according to the nonpartisan election research group FairVote.
Typically, though, there is little change in the number of votes following a recount – the median swing between the top two candidates is just 219 votes. That’s far less than the number of votes that separate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the three states where Stein is campaigning for recounts. In Wisconsin, Trump won 27,257 more votes than Clinton; in Pennsylvania he won by 68,236; and in Michigan he won by 11,612.
But the overall number of votes matter too – the average swing in a recount according to FairVote was 0.2 percentage points, which could be enough to secure Clinton as the winner in Michigan. Even if that were the case, however, the former secretary of state would still need to win back another 22 electoral college votes to be declared the next US president.