Green Party drops Pennsylvania recount.

Former Green Party candidate Jill Stein. AP.

The Green Party has dropped it's bid to force a recount after running out of funds. AP. The effort was halted when the Green Party could not afford a $1 million bond imposed by the courts. Donald Trump won Pennsylvania by 50,000 votes. Stein has launched recount efforts in three states that Donald Trump won, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those efforts were successful in Wisconsin, where a recount is underway, and is expected to result in a recount in Michigan as well. Stein and the Green Party argue that it is possible that voting machines were hacked by Russian agents. They have offered up zero evidence for this accusation. 

My Comment:

I'm glad Jill Stein's recount efforts have failed. The win margin in Pennsylvania was large enough that it was extremely unlikely that a recount would have any effect on the vote at all. Even though the margins were closer in Wisconsin and Michigan, a recount in those two states is just as useless. 

Indeed, the updated results from the recount in Wisconsin shows almost no change. Local media shows that the gains and losses for the candidates were mostly insignificant. WBAY has an article about the recount in Wisconsin here. 

The effort is such a complete waste of time and money that I suspect that Stein has other motives here. If she really cared about the integrity of the elections she would have called for recounts in elections that went for Hillary Clinton by small margins, such as New Hampshire. Or for a recount in places that had problems during early voting like Texas. Or even a national wide recount that would target safe blue states like Illinois and California. 

Those states would be much more likely to find active voter fraud. In the Project Veritas videos, multiple Democratic operatives and officials admitted to voter fraud in multiple states, most explicitly in New York City. Though these accusations came via Project Veritas, which has been ironically blasted by the left leaning media as being biased, there is no context that the statement these men made could be put into that would make what they said appropriate. 

Since Jill Stein isn't interested in a recount in any of the places voter fraud was likely, I think this is just a cynical attempt to gain support for the Green Party. Her argument for disgruntled Democrats is going to be that she was the one who fought against Donald Trump. The Democratic Party has largely ignored the recount, with the Clinton campaign only joining the recount campaign reluctantly. 

I also think that Stein is full of it. Stein raised more money for the recount then she did for her actual presidential campaign. She raised almost $7 million dollars, which is more then enough to cover the $1 million needed in Pennsylvania. I think that Stein's donors need to ask some serious questions about where their recount money went. 

I have to say that this entire debacle has greatly reduced my opinion of Dr. Jill Stein. During the election I viewed here as an eccentric woman with really stupid political beliefs, but who was basically honest and a straight shooter. Much of that was due to the fact that she spent most of her time bashing Hillary Clinton. She really ripped into her and to have her suddenly support an effort that would only help Clinton shows to me that she isn't the honest person I thought she was. Instead she's a political opportunist, just as cynical as anyone from the establishment. 

I also think that here suggestion that Russia hacked voting machines in the three states up for recount is ludicrous and is essentially a conspiracy theory. For one thing, many counties didn't even use voting machines. I voted in Wisconsin and in our county we used paper ballots and an optical scanner not connected to the internet. I would like to know how Russia could have hacked that! There are a few counties where voting machines were used, but none of them were populous enough to swing the election alone.

It just fits into a disturbing trend on the left to blame Russia for everything. Lose a major election with an unpopular candidate? Must be election interference by Russia. People don't believe your talking points anymore? Must be due to "fake news" put out by Russian agents. Donald Trump wants better relations with Russia? He's a Kremlin stooge. Instead of asking hard questions about why the left is losing, they are just using Russia as a boogeyman. It allows them to blame everything that goes wrong on a foreign power. I'd be all for it if it wasn't for the fact that if the Democrats ever regain power (probably in 8 years) they might just start a nuclear war with Russia just out of spite. Indeed, if Hillary Clinton had been elected I wouldn't be surprised if that was where we would have been heading anyways. 

No matter what though, I hope this is the last post I write about the election itself. The efforts to drag the election out are making an already exhausting cycle a sadistic death march. Trump won and the election is over. These plans to recount the vote or even force electors to vote for people that didn't win their states are just drawing out the inevitable. I, for one, can't wait until Trump is sworn in and these plans are reveled to be a complete waste of time.