Jill Stein Campaign Confident that Recount will be Completed by Dec. 13
The recount in Michigan has started this week, despite extraordinary efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to obstruct the effort at every turn. The Board of State Canvassers deadlocked along party lines Friday on a legal maneuver by Trump to block the recount, which cleared the way for the recount to proceed. Two suits are still pending, one filed by the Attorney General of Michigan against his own Board of Elections and one from Trump himself.
A federal judge in Detroit this morning heard a case brought by the Stein campaign to expedite the recount, which faced a multi-day delay following the Board of State Canvassers meeting on Trump’s objection to the recount on Friday. TKTKTK ruling.Despite this ruling, the recount will start this week and the Stein campaign expressed confidence it can be completed by Dec. 13.
“Despite all the obstacles that Donald Trump and his cronies in the political establishment have thrown in our way, we are excited to be pushing forward with the recount in Michigan,” said Dr. Jill Stein. “People have been raising the alarm about voter suppression for quite some time. According to a U.S. Civil Rights Commission report, voters of color are at massively increased risk of having their votes misread or simply tossed out by human error or by badly maintained and poorly calibrated machines in underserved communities. It is past time that we stand firm and ensure that the hard-fought, hard-won right to vote in these communities is truly respected. Now more than ever, we must fight to have an accurate, secure, and just voting system in which all Americans can trust that their voices are heard. We will not give in to intimidation, lawfare, or bureaucratic obstruction.”
At the center of Michigan’s recount – initiated by Jill Stein and backed by grassroots support from Michigan and across the country – is the fact that there were 75,335 “under-votes” in the state, which are ballots that are filled out except for the vote for President—double the number from 2012. Many of these are in Oakland and Wayne Counties, which include Detroit, raising the very real possibility that communities of color may have been disenfranchised by an unreliable counting of the votes. The number of under-votes exceeds by several-fold Trump’s margin of victory in the state.
“When irregularities like these raise red flags, we must dig deeper, and the only way we’ll know if everyone’s vote has been respected is to do a recount,” said Stein.
