On Saturday, President-elect Donald Trump bashed what he called a “scam” from Green Party nominee Jill Stein, after Stein aimed for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
LAS VEGAS NEVADA, DECEMBER 14, 2015: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at campaign event at Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino the day before the CNN Republican Presidential Debate ( Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com)
President-elect Donald Trump issued a statement regarding the recount calling it “ridiculous” and arguing “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.
President-elect argued that he won the vast majority of battleground states.
“This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than 1% 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,” he said. “All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.”
“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,” he continued.
Jill Stein filed petitions in Wisconsin on Friday to conduct a recount in the state, where Donald Trump nearly defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by roughly 30,000 votes. Jill Stein has also started raising money for potential recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump appears to have won by only 10,000 votes and 70,000 votes respectively.
New York, New York, USA; June 7th, 2016; Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at her primary night victory rally at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. (Krista Kennell / Shutterstock.com)
On Saturday, the Hillary Clinton campaign announced that they would participate in the recount but, argue they found it unlikely the recount will change the outcome of the election.
“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,” a Clinton campaign representative, Mark Elias wrote.
The Obama Administration announced that they have seen no evidence that hackers tampered with the 2016 presidential election.
In their statement, the administration said, “The Kremlin probably expected that publicity surrounding the disclosures that followed the Russian government-directed compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, would raise questions about the integrity of the election process that could have undermined the legitimacy of the president-elect.”