Clinton campaign will support election recount efforts

WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer announced plans to participate in vote recounts of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan if they happen, but doesn’t expect to overturn the election of Donald Trump as president.

If Green Party candidate Jill Stein gets recounts in all of those states, the Clinton campaign “will participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” lawyer Mark Elias said Saturday in a post on Medium.com.

The Democrat’s campaign didn’t plan to initiate recounts on its own because it hasn’t found “any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology,” Elias wrote.

Elias also isn’t expecting the recounts to erase what he said was a 107,000 combined vote margin separating the candidates in the three states and overturning the election of Trump, who is due to be sworn in as president in January.

“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,” Elias said. “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.”

Elias said there also is an obligation to the voters now that a recount is planned in Wisconsin and perhaps the other two states. The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Friday said it had received Stein’s petition.

“We believe we have an obligation to the more than 64 million Americans who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton to participate in ongoing proceedings to ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported,” Elias said.