While You Were Hiding From Your Family, Jill Stein Raised Over $3 Million to Fund a Vote Recount

Every day since the election, I wake up and think: What is going on? There’s always some new story that seems more improbable and insane than the one before it. And on this Thanksgiving, perhaps the most improbable one yet: While you were sleeping/Netflix binging/cooking/hiding from your family, Jill Stein has raised over $3 million to fund vote recounts in the three key battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The move for a recount comes after reports that electronic voting in those states could be vulnerable to cyberattacks. J. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, who was part of a group to raise concerns earlier this week to the Clinton campaign, explains in a post on Medium:

Could anyone be brazen enough to try such an attack? A few years ago, I might have said that sounds like science fiction, but 2016 has seen unprecedented cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the election. This summer, attackers broke into the email system of the Democratic National Committee and, separately, into the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, and leaked private messages. Attackers infiltrated the voter registration systems of two states, Illinois and Arizona, and stole voter data. And there’s evidence that hackers attempted to breach election offices in several other states.





He concedes:

Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not. I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked. But I don’t believe that either one of these seemingly unlikely explanations is overwhelmingly more likely than the other. The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts.

Enter, Jill Stein.

In a statement on Stein’s fundraising page, she writes:

The Green Party Platform calls for “publicly-owned, open source voting equipment and deploy it across the nation to ensure high national standards, performance, transparency and accountability; use verifiable paper ballots; and institute mandatory automatic random precinct recounts to ensure a high level of accuracy in election results. “Election integrity experts have independently identified Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as states where “statistical anomalies” raised concerns. Our effort to recount votes in those states is not intended to help Hillary Clinton.These recounts are part of an election integrity movement to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the U.S. election system is.

As of this publishing Stein has raised $3,346,901.76, successfully covering the $1.1 million filing fee for Wisconsin’s November 25th voting audit deadline, and looking good for to cover the .5 million filing fee for Pennsylvania (due November 28) and $.6 million for Michigan (due November 30), as well as legal fees.

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