Green Party to ask Pennsylvania court to order presidential recount
WASHINGTON – The Green Party says it will ask a Pennsylvania court to order a statewide recount of the state’s Nov. 8 presidential election result.
But it’s unclear if the courts would have authority to do so.
A lawyer for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein wouldn’t discuss what would be alleged in the expected lawsuit Monday.
Republican President-elect Donald Trump edged Democrat Hillary Clinton by about 71,000 votes, or about 1 percent, in Pennsylvania.
Democratic Secretary of State Pedro Cortes says there’s no evidence of voting irregularities or cyberattacks on Pennsylvania’s voting machines, 96 percent of which record votes electronically and leave no paper trail.
A GOP lawyer says the courts lack authority to order a statewide recount. Cortes says he’s also unaware of the courts having authority to do so
Texas elector to resign
A Republican member of the Electoral College from Texas says he’s resigning so he won’t cast one of the state’s 38 electoral votes for Donald Trump.
Art Sisneros previously told The Associated Press that he was wavering on supporting Trump because the Republican “is not biblically qualified for office.”
In a lengthy weekend blog post, Sisneros updated that, saying “the best option I see at this time is to resign my position as an elector.”
Texas doesn’t require its presidential electors to vote in accordance with the state’s presidential election results. Trump won Texas by around 9 percentage points and captured 290 overall electoral votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232.
Texas electors meet in Austin next month to vote for president. By state law, they can vote then on a replacement for Sisneros.
Trump claims voter fraud
President-elect Donald Trump is claiming, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally in the election he won, issuing the baseless claim as part of his angry response to a recount effort led by the Green Party and joined by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Trump tweeted on Sunday that he won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” He later alleged “serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Trump’s transition team did not provide any evidence to back up the president-elect’s assertions of fraud in the November election. They pointed only to past charges of irregularities in voter registration.
There has been no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking that would change the results of the presidential contest between Trump and Clinton.