Jill Stein files for election recount in Pennsylvania

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed for a recount of votes Mondayin Pennsylvania, one of three battleground states where President-elect Donald Trump won in his Electoral College victory.

A statement released on behalf of Stein circulated on Twitter Monday afternoon. The statement said recounts could begin in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — another state where the candidate has filed — as soon as this week.

“Americans deserve a voting system we can trust,” Stein said in the statement, released by the public relations firm Berlin Rosen. “After a presidential election tarnished by the use of outdated and unreliable machines and accusations of irregularities and hacks, people of all political persuasions are asking if our election results are reliable.”

It continued: “We must recount the votes so we can build trust in our election system. We need to verify the vote in this and every election so that Americans of all parties can be sure we have a fair, secure and accurate voting system,” Stein wrote.

Last week, Stein launched an initiativeto raise $7 million to fund the recount fees in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. As of Monday afternoon, Steinhad raisedmore than $6.2 million, according to a tracker on her campaign website.

Per the team’s statement, 137,000 supporters gave an average of $46 per donation.

According to Politico, Stein’s insistence on a recount stems from a New York Magazine article, in which a cybersecurity expert urged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to contest the results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

One expert cited in the articlelater clarified that it was more likelythe polls were “systematically wrong” rather than the election was hacked.

And other election experts have denied any evidence of tampering with electronic voting machines.

Still, Stein cited other hacks — including on the Democratic National Committee and the personal emails of a senior Clinton official — as basis for the possibility of hacked voting machines.

The third-party candidate, who won less than 1 percent of the vote on Nov. 8, called outPennsylvania’s “outdated or unaccountable” voting system. The statement released by her team said the touch-screen method (or Direct Record Electronic) doesn’t keep a paper record of votes made; other states have phased out such voting methods over security concerns.

Clinton’s camp had not previously planned to engage in a vote recount until Wisconsin’s elections board approved Stein’s request. Now, it plans to participate to “ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Marc Elias, counsel for the Clinton campaign, wrote in a post on Medium.

Trump, meanwhile, denounced such efforts Saturday and Sunday, calling it “ridiculous” and “a scam.”

“The people have spoken and the election is over,” Trump tweeted.”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.'”

Later Sunday, the president-elect said in a series of tweetsillegal votes cost him the popular vote, and charged that there was “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.

This is the first time Trump has alleged any voter fraud in his own victory, and there’s no evidence of any widespread fraud.