Madison — A 13-day race to recount nearly 3 million presidential ballots starts Thursday in Wisconsin, with some workers prepared to tally votes until midnight in the nation’s first statewide presidential recount since 2004 — one experts believe has little chance of changing the outcome of the race.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s campaign paid $3.5 million to cover the costs of the recount, which will include the use of ballot counting machines following Stein’s failure Tuesday to convince a judge to mandate the recount be done entirely by hand.
A spokesman for the Wisconsin Election Commission said the agency will be trying to gather and release daily recount data from each county in the state showing any tally changes for voting wards. Reid Magney said news media might need to add up the data themselves to determine whether GOP President-elect Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton see a statewide gain in votes on a given day. Kingroot Apk
“In a statewide sense I don’t know if we’re going to go that far,” Magney said of analyzing the raw data before the recount ends.
In addition, the agency will be collecting an explanation from local officials for all the cases in which 10 or more votes are changed in a given reporting unit, which is typically a voting ward.
In the official count of the 2.98 million votes cast in Wisconsin, Trump was certified to have won by 22,000 votes — an outcome that is very unlikely to change if this recount behaves as other statewide recounts have in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Workers sort absentee ballots as part of a Wisconsin presidential recount at the Iowa County Courthouse in Dodgeville. Thursday was the first day of recounting ballots from the presidential election. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein raised to pay the $3.5 million for the massive recount. Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
On Wednesday, Stein filed another recount petition in Michigan and the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a federal elections complaint against both Stein and Clinton. The GOP complaint alleges that Stein — who received only a small share of the vote — is improperly fundraising to pay for a recount that primarily benefits Clinton, the second-place finisher behind Trump.
David Cobb, campaign manager for the Stein recount effort, dismissed the complaint as false and without merit.
The Clinton campaign has said it would not have sought a recount itself because it is very unlikely to change the winner. But Clinton’s campaign has become involved in the process launched by Stein in Wisconsin, for instance backing Stein’s unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to block the use of ballot-counting machines.
The last statewide presidential recount appears to have taken place in Ohio in 2004 and changed the vote tallies in the race by only about 300 votes. Then President George W. Bush, a Republican, won that contest over Democrat John Kerry.
A far more prominent fight took place in Florida in 2000, as the recount of the presidential vote there between Bush and Democrat Al Gore became part of the U.S. Supreme Court case that left Bush as the winner in that race.
In Milwaukee on Wednesday, hundreds of bags of ballots cast on Nov. 8 were trucked under a law enforcement escort from the Milwaukee County Courthouse to a south side warehouse in preparation for the recount, County Clerk Joe Czarnezki said.
Voters in the county’s 19 municipalities cast 440,247 ballots for president in the election and the Board of Canvassers will decide Thursday morning if each of them will be recounted by machine or by hand, Czarnezki said at a Wednesday news conference. Milwaukee County Sheriff’s deputies provided Wednesday’s escort and will secure the ballots 24-hours-day until the recount is completed.
Around 130 workers hired by county communities for $15 an hour packed into the City of Milwaukee Election Commission warehouse on S. Kinnickinnic Ave.
The city and its 50 tabulators are assigned one room in the warehouse to work through ballots cast in the city while tabulators from the other 18 municipalities are assigned an adjacent room. Each suburban municipality will work on a schedule posted on the county election commission website.
Thursday morning, the Milwaukee County Election Commission voted to conduct a machine recount rather than recounting the ballots by hand.
Commissioners also voted to test just two of the machines. But an observer affiliated with the Green Party objected, arguing that of all of them should be tested. The commission then agreed to test all of them, and tests were still being conducted as of 10:30 am.
Meanwhile, Clark County Clerk Christina Jensen said her county will do the recount by hand, partly because most voting precincts used paper ballots but also to put people’s minds at ease.
“We’re a small county, so it’s almost just as fast to hand count,” Jensen said. “Many of our municipalities use paper ballots, so we’d be hand counting them anyway.”
Waukesha County county clerk Kathleen Novack said she plans two daily shifts of workers who will make $10 an hour as they race to finish the recount there. They will work until midnight on weekdays and 8 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Novack said.
