But, in a
post on Medium, Marc Elias, the campaign's counsel, said the campaign's
own investigation has not uncovered any evidence of hacking of voting
systems.
In
the campaign's most detailed comments to date on the recount, Elias
wrote that while the campaign was not going to contest the results
itself, it has decided now to take part in the effort to "ensure that it
is fair to all sides."
But President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday dismissed the recount and said that "the election is over."
"The
people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton
herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by
congratulating me, 'We must accept this result and then look to the
future,'" Trump said in a statement, which called the recount
"ridiculous" in a headline.
The
President-elect blasted the Green Party's effort as a "scam" and
accused the party's nominee, Jill Stein, of trying to reel in donations
that she won't actually spend on a recount.
"This
recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one
percent of the vote overall and wasn't even on the ballot in many
states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never
even spend on this ridiculous recount," Trump said. "This is a scam by
the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the
results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged
and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing."
Green Party officials filed Friday for a recount in Wisconsin after reports of voting discrepancies.
Wisconsin
Green Party co-chairman George Martin said that the party was seeking a
"reconciliation of paper records" -- a request that would go one step
further than a simple recount, which is expected to begin next week, and
that he hopes will spur an investigation into the integrity of the
state's voting system.
"This is a process, a first step to examine whether our electoral democracy is working," Martin said.
Elias
said the campaign had been quietly investigating accusations for a
while and had received hundreds of requests that it do so.
"Because
we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside
attempts to alter the voting technology, 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," Elias wrote on Medium.
"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," he added.
Brian
Fallon, spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said the team would not have
sought the recount on its own and that they see no evidence of
tampering so far.
"We note we are
guarding our prerogatives now that someone else has launched a recount.
Not sure what you could point to to suggest there is anything here that
calls the results into question," he told CNN.
In
addition to Trump's total combined margin of victory in Michigan,
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania being only about 107,000 votes -- by
contrast, the Florida margin in Bush-Gore was 537 ballots -- Elias said
concerns about Russia's interference in the election continue to raise
concerns.
"This election cycle was
unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the
campaign: the U.S. government concluded that Russian state actors were
behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the personal
email accounts of Hillary for America campaign officials, and just
yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Russian government was
behind much of the "fake news" propaganda that circulated online in the
closing weeks of the election," he wrote.
A senior administration official said in a statement that there is no evidence of any hacking.
"The
federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious
cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election
Day," the official said. "As we have noted before, we remained confident
in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that
was borne out on Election Day. As a result, we believe our elections
were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."
The
Clinton campaign has met with lawyers, data scientists and analysts to
assess anomalies in the results that would suggest a hacked result.
Private meetings with outside experts involved sharing both groups
concerns about the data and findings.
Clinton's
team said they investigated every theory presented and examined laws
and practices pertaining to recounts, contests and audits.
"And
most importantly, we have monitored and staffed the post-election
canvasses -- where voting machine tapes are compared to poll-books,
provisional ballots are resolved, and all of the math is double checked
from election night," Elias said. "During that process, we have seen
Secretary Clinton's vote total grow, so that, today, her national
popular vote lead now exceeds more than 2 million votes."
The campaign plans to move forward in monitoring activities to better understand the results.
"In
the coming days, we will continue to perform our due diligence and
actively follow all further activities that are to occur prior to the
certification of any election results," he said.
It is "unfortunate" that all states don't conduct "post-election" audits.
"Wisconsin
and Pennsylvania conduct post-election audits using a sampling of
precincts. Michigan and many other states still do not," Elias wrote.
"This is unfortunate; it is our strong belief that, in addition to an
election canvass, every state should do this basic audit to ensure
accuracy and public confidence in the election."
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