Clinton Campaign to Join in Recount Effort, as Stein Officially Files in Wisconsin

Hillary Clinton's campaign said Saturday it will participate in electoral recounts in Wisconsin--where such an effort was officially initiated on Friday--as well as in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who has raised more than $5 million toward the effort, filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon, just ahead of a 5pm deadline.

"After a divisive and painful presidential race, in which foreign agents hacked into party databases, private email servers, and voter databases in certain states, many Americans are wondering if our election results are reliable," Stein said in a statement this week. "That's why the unexpected results of the election and reported anomalies need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust."

CNN reported:

Wisconsin Green Party co-chairman George Martin said that they were seeking a "reconciliation of paper records"--a request that would go one step further than a simple recount, spurring, he said, an investigation into the integrity of the state's voting system.

The recount is expected to begin late next week. "The state is working under a federal deadline of December 13 to complete the recount," Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Michael Haas said in a statement. "As a result, county boards of canvassers may need to work evenings and weekends to meet the deadlines."

The deadlines for recount requests in Pennsylvania and Michigan are this Monday and Wednesday, respectively.

While Clinton has thus far stayed mum on the calls for recounts, Hillary for America general counsel Marc Erik Elias wrote Saturday in a post on Medium that the campaign has "quietly taken a number of steps in the last two weeks to rule in or out any possibility of outside interference in the vote tally in these critical battleground states."

The post continued:

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. 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. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states -- Michigan -- well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.

Clinton, whose popular vote lead now exceeds two million votes, lost to President-Elect Donald Trump in Pennsylvania by about 71,000 votes; in Wisconsin by about 22,000 votes; and in Michigan by about 10,000 votes.