Posted on 11/30/2016 6:37:16 AM PST by SunStar
Most people couldn't wait for the grueling, nasty, seemingly interminable 2016 election to end. Jill Stein wants to keep it going. And she's willing to waste a lot of money, time, and attention to do so. Like a bad actor that insists on one last curtain call after the audience has headed for the exits, the Green Party nominee seems to stubbornly believe in her relevance even after the election demonstrated its non-existence beyond any doubt.
Stein's demand for recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania demonstrates arrogance bordering on parody. Stein didn't lose the election so much as she disappeared in it. More than 134 million ballots have been counted so far. Stein received fewer than 1.5 million of them. That's barely a percentage point of the overall popular vote. Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson garnered more than 4 million votes, while the two major-party nominees scored between 62 and 65 million votes each.
Legally, any candidate has standing to request a recount — as long as they pay the costs. Politically and morally, however, Stein utterly lacks any standing to claim she has been harmed by ballot irregularities and counting errors. Proper standing — at least in political and commonsense contexts — would go to the person who might have otherwise won an election without such alleged irregularities.
That means the one candidate who might have a decent argument for recounts in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan is Hillary Clinton. (And indeed, Stein's recount demands are surely intended to help Clinton.) So why hasn't the Democrat who sustained a shocking loss in the party's famed "Blue Wall" states pushed for recounts herself? For one thing, Clinton has already conceded the race to Donald Trump, reportedly urged by President Barack Obama to do so.
The optics would also be terrible. Clinton spent the last weeks of the election hyperventilating, along with the media, about Trump's refusal to commit to accepting Election Night results. She called it "horrifying" and repeatedly hit Trump's lack of respect for the electoral system. To suddenly demand recounts after those attacks would be a hypocrisy that might be beyond the reach of any politician.
Beyond that, though, there are many thousands of reasons not to demand a recount. Specifically, there are 10,700 reasons in Michigan, 22,000 in Wisconsin, and 68,000 in Pennsylvania. Those are the votes that Clinton would have to make up in a recount to change the outcome in each state, and she'd need to succeed in all three of those states to change the Electoral College outcome. No recount has ever produced a vote change of that magnitude; no recount has even come close to it. FiveThirtyEight's Carl Bialik, working off of data from FairVote, noted that only three of 27 statewide recounts since 2000 have succeeded in changing the outcome of an election — and only when the original totals were much closer than any of those seen in the 2016 race.
"The mean swing between the top two candidates in the 27 recounts was 282 votes, with a median of 219," Bialik explains. "The biggest swing came in Florida's 2000 presidential election recount, when Al Gore cut 1,247 votes off George W. Bush's lead, ultimately not enough to flip the state to his column."
What about the recounts that have succeeded? Well, I had a ringside seat for one in Minnesota, when Al Franken turned an Election Night defeat into a U.S. Senate seat seven months later. The recount turned into the most bruising, partisan, and contentious political fight the state had ever seen. After several months of recounting, ballot challenges, and numerous court appearances, the change in the gap between Franken and incumbent Norm Coleman was 527 votes — a miniscule amount of the 2.6 million votes cast. It was just enough to erase Coleman's 215-vote lead after the state-certified canvassing a week after the election and give Franken a 312-vote win in its place.
Stein continues to insist that she wants to pursue the recounts to demand change in voting infrastructure. But her recounts, like those 27 that have preceded them since 2000, would likely make the opposite point — that our vote-counting infrastructure actually gets accurate and reliable results. Even the Florida debacle in 2000 changed the results by 0.022 percent, just about the same percentage as in 2008's Minnesota recount. It would take 10 times that kind of scale to flip Michigan, and 30 times that scale to flip Wisconsin. Stein's recount demands envision vote swings on a patently ridiculous scale.
Small wonder that even Democrats like Joe Trippi have openly scorned Stein's effort. "It's a waste of time and effort," the Democratic strategist said. "I think it probably was the Stein people looking for a way to stay relevant, raise some money, and take the stink off of them" — a reference to accusations that Stein played a spoiler role in diverting enough Clinton votes in these states to give Trump the victory. Bob Shrum, another Democratic eminence grise, put it more bluntly — that there was "no chance" for these recounts to succeed.
Ballot integrity and voting infrastructure aren't the reason for Stein's stunts. Neither is the election outcome. Stein just wants to keep imposing herself on the national stage, eating up time and resources from state governments in order to raise money from suckers unhappy with Trump's victory and feed her own delusions of relevance. Shame on her, and shame on those egging her on.
Hoped to be another Al Franken. Instead, became Jill Frankenstein.
It’s a way for her to get an email list that she can sell, request money from and it is hers not any party. The gold is in the email addresses.
Even the Green Party has rejected her recount ideas
Stein is nothing more than Hillary’s tool.
“Small wonder that even Democrats like Joe Trippi”
Good cop, bad cop routine since they are actively supporting Stein now!
This isn’t about Stein.
First, it’s a long-shot attempt at installing Hilliary! in the White House.
Second, it’s intended to paint Trump as illegitimate in the eyes of the public.
Notably, both ploys are from the Democratic Party playbook that Trump obliterated in November.
She’s just a spoiled, crazy, commie hag, They’re a dime a dozen in the Northeast. She’s better at it.
GOOD!!!!
The REAL reason to demand these recounts is to give a YUGE FU to Donald Trump and his voters/supporters, and to make some serious cash.
They won’t turn the election results, just maybe change a couple of hundred votes at most but they are not able to turn 10,000 votes in Michigan, the closest race. AND THEY KNOW THIS.
They may be stupid but they’re not dumb enough to know this will have an impact on the results of the election.
Hillary and the democrat strategists supports this in the background because their goal is to keep passions up and the country bitterly divided until 2020 when we can go through all this election crap again. If half the country is still enraged, they’re more likely to vote.
Party Uber Alles!
Stein is nothing more than Hillary's stool. Corrected it for ya.
> Like a bad actor that insists on one last curtain call after the audience has headed for the exits
An apt analogy, particularly since the requested manual recount was denied in favor of a machine recount. Stein’s scheme is foiled.
Hello, Wisconsin Freepers! Does anyone know of Trump/Pence, RNC, GOP, or others’ plans to observe/monitor the recount effort - especially in the liberal stalwart counties like Dane?
Hillary should age so gracefully. That said, what a ditz Stein is; and a greedy one at that.
I think it’s dead. The denial of the hand recount killed it.
Stein’s scheme was to impeach the tabulation machines and she wanted a hand recount to “prove” it. A hand recount would almost certainly differ from a machine recount simply because a human will divine “voter intent”. Once the count difference is generated the tabulation machines would be condemned and she’s off to other states, like Pennsylvania, where she would claim the difference as prima facie evidence of an illegal election.
Stein did play a spoiler role. A big one.
She may have school smarts and be charismatic and sociopathic but she is mathematically uncommonly dense.
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