Monday, November 28, 2016

When you've lost The New Yorker

By Donald Sensing

The Recount Road to Nowhere - The New Yorker:

A candidate needs two hundred and seventy Electoral College votes to win the Presidency. Trump has three hundred and six, and Clinton has two hundred and thirty-two. This includes sixteen for Trump from Michigan, where his victory, by ten thousand votes, was certified this afternoon. Wisconsin has ten electoral votes, and he is ahead by about thirty thousand; Pennsylvania has twenty, and the lead is seventy thousand. A recount would have to reverse the results in all three states to get Clinton to two hundred and seventy. And, as fivethirtyeight.com noted, this has never happened in cases where the margins are as large as those in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania; even Michigan would be at the edge of past experience. (It is worth noting that Jill Stein won enough votes in Michigan and Wisconsin to account for Clinton’s losses there.) Stein’s Wisconsin application lists a number of reasons for a recount, most of which are paraphrases of a single thought: the Russians might, just might, have fixed the election—after all, they hacked John Podesta’s e-mail. Added to that is the general observation that electronic voting systems are, in any state, theoretically hackable. That amounts to saying that no one should really trust any results. 
It's all about the mawney, you see, of which Jill Stein has pocketed almost $7 million for the recount effort alone, multiples more than she raised in the last several weeks of the campaign. And delegitimizing Trump's upcoming electoral college victory, hence delegitimizing the entire Trump administration.

Update: And The Week concludes in The Delusional Melodrama of Jill Stein,
Ballot integrity and voting infrastructure aren't the reason for Stein's stunts. Neither is the election outcome. Stein just wants to keep imposing herself on the national stage, eating up time and resources from state governments in order to raise money from suckers unhappy with Trump's victory and feed her own delusions of relevance. Shame on her, and shame on those egging her on.
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