Source: Time

By Maya Rhodan

The Wisconsin State Board of Elections has decided to move forward with a recount effort pushed by 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein. As deadlines loom in Pennsylvania and Michigan, Stein continued her push for battleground recounts on Monday.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign came out in support of the recount efforts on Saturday, though Clinton’s general counsel Marc Elias wrote in a Medium post that it doesn’t expect the outcome of the election to change as a result.

“Regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself,” Elias wrote.

The calls for a recount have apparently frustrated President-elect Donald Trump, who took to Twitter over the weekend to denounce the efforts and recall earlier statements by Clinton that she would accept the outcome of the 2016 presidential election regardless of the winner.

For reference, here’s a breakdown of what’s going on and how we got here:

Who asked for the recount?

Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

After claims that Russian hackers had been making attempts throughout the 2016 cycle to undermine the U.S. presidential election, some security experts argued the only way to guarantee nothing occurred would be to manually check the paper ballots. A Medium post by J. Alexander Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, noted that officials had been in touch with the campaign about calling for a recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“The only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result is to closely examine the available physical evidence — paper ballots and voting equipment in critical states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, nobody is ever going to examine that evidence unless candidates in those states act now, in the next several days, to petition for recounts,” he wrote.

In response, Stein launched a campaign to fund recounts in the three states. To date, the Recount 2016 campaign has raised over $6 million.

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