Jill Stein's election recount ends as Wisconsin finds 131 more Trump votes

Jill Stein

TheGuardian - The recount effort by Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein came to an end on Monday, after weeks of legal wrangling yielded only one electoral review in Wisconsin that ended up favoring Donald Trump.

Earlier in the day, a federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected Stein’s request for a recount and an examination of that state’s voting machines for evidence of hacking in the 8 November election.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin election officials said on Monday that they had completed their 10-day recount after finding that Trump’s margin of victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton had increased by 131 votes, bringing Trump’s total lead to 22,748.

Stein, who finished fourth, challenged the results in those two states as well as Michigan, where the state’s top court on Friday denied Stein’s last-ditch appeal to keep a recount going. All of those traditionally Democratic strongholds supported Trump over Clinton.

Even if all three recounts had taken place, it was considered highly unlikely that they would flip the overall result from Trump to Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

US presidential elections are determined not by the overall national popular vote but by the electoral college, which awards votes based on the outcome in each state. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.6m ballots nationwide, according to the latest count.