By Rebecca Fernandez
On Nov. 25, the Wisconsin Election Commission announced a statewide recount after receiving a petition from Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Stein’s campaign announced its intentions on her website Nov. 22, expressing cyber-security concerns: “In an election surrounded by hacks, the use of systems that have been demonstrated to be easily hacked should concern every American.”
This is not the first time threats to ballot machines have been brought up during this election cycle. On Election Day, Donald Trump was preparing to contest the vote should he lose, telling Fox News, “There are reports that, when people vote for Republicans, the entire ticket switches over to Democrats — you’ve seen that — it’s happening at various places today, it’s been reported.” He spent the day re-tweeting voters’ concerns and even mistakenly reporting countrywide voting machine problems. All of this was in line with his campaign’s consistent, strategic claims that the election was rigged in his opponent’s favor.
By positioning himself as an underdog target of crooked politics and media, Trump successfully turned the attention away from the enormous contributions received from corporate interests as well as his upcoming trials and daily scandals. The now president-elect was quick to abandon his suspicions when the polls showed him leading, apparently unbothered by the question of integrity when the numbers are in his favor.
On Nov. 26, he responded to the news of Wisconsin’s recount by calling it a “scam” led by “the badly defeated & demoralized Dems.” One of Trump’s senior advisers, Kellyane Conway, went on to call Hillary Clinton and Stein “a bunch of crybabies and sore losers,” clearly already having forgotten Trump’s assertion that he would refuse to accept a loss.
Sore loser or not, Stein has raised more than $5 million, as reported by the New York Times, and will now turn to Michigan and Pennsylvania to petition the three swing states that determined the election.
According to the Associated Press, the last statewide recount for the 2011 Wisconsin Supreme Court election cost $520,000. Such a bill would fall on Stein and the recount’s donations because the gap between first and second place was greater than 0.25 percent of the total. Though Clinton’s general counsel came out in support of Stein’s efforts, Stein confused many on the Internet on Nov. 26 when she questioned Clinton’s motivations. She tweeted, “Why would Hillary Clinton — who conceded the election to Donald Trump — want #Recount2016? You cannot be on-again, off-again about democracy.”
Without explicitly supporting Clinton, Stein’s effort begins to look like nothing more than rabble-rousing. If the third-party candidate’s hope for the recount is to undermine the two-party system, she may be succeeding by holding the former candidates up to their word. If Clinton’s camp follows through on its support of the recount, it becomes a hypocrite for its condemnations of Trump’s rigged-election theories. By refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of an audit or recount, Trump exposes himself as a hypocrite (whether that matters to him is unclear). If Trump wants to prove his dedication to maintaining the integrity of his party, maybe he should put his money where his mouth is and throw a couple million in pocket change toward the crybaby Dem losers and prove his claim to the presidency.