Hillary Clinton has registered as an “intervenor” in Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s Wisconsin election recount effort.
Clinton’s lawyer filed the paperwork with the Dane County clerk on Tuesday, LawNewz reported. On Monday, Stein filed a complaint against the Wisconsin Elections Commission calling for a recount of the Wisconsin vote. A court hearing is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, and the recount is set to begin on Thursday.
Donald Trump beat Clinton in Wisconsin by nearly 23,000 votes, securing the state’s 10 electoral votes. Stein received nearly 31,000 votes.
As an intervenor, Clinton is technically not questioning the outcome of the Wisconsin election. Instead, her lawyers have said that the campaign wants to join any re-count effort to ensure that the process “is fair to all sides.”
Over the weekend, Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias penned a blog post announcing that the campaign planned to participate in Stein’s petition. The post led to accusations that Clinton and company were questioning the Wisconsin vote tally.
But Elias did write that the campaign has little expectation that Stein’s bid will change the outcome of the election.
“Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” Elias wrote.
He also said that if Stein pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, “we will take the same approach in those states as well.”
“We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount,” Elias wrote. “But 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.”
Trump beat Clinton by 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. The outcome was closer in Michigan, where Trump won by 11,000 votes. The outcome in all three states would have to be reversed — an unlikely scenario — for Clinton to end up winning the general election. She received 232 electoral votes to Trump’s 306.
