Jill Stein adopts county level strategy to force automatic statewide Pennsylvania recount
The political world was a buzz on Saturday evening with headlines from major news outlet screaming that Jill Stein’s recount effort in Pennsylvania was “over” or “finished” after she withdrew her statewide recount request. But as it turns out, those headlines aren’t even close to being true. The real story, buried in the fine print of some of these mainstream media articles, is that Stein is switching to an entirely new strategy in Pennsylvania which is aimed at forcing a statewide recount to happen.
Now that voluntary vote total revisions from various Pennsylvania precincts and counties have reduced Donald Trump’s lead to around just 0.8% from its original 1.2%, Jill Stein is changing her strategy. Pennsylvania state law requires an automatic statewide recount if the winning margin is 0.5% or less. And so Stein is now pursuing county level recounts in the hope that the corrected numbers will indeed shrink Trump’s lead below the threshold.
How do we know this? We have to read closely. For instance, buried in the seventh paragraph of an eight paragraph article in the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper whose headline falsely claims “Stein drops recount effort,” we find the actual story: “Stein’s campaign intends to continue its county-by-county recount effort in Pennsylvania, said attorney Larry Otter. That requires efforts in individual precincts – a process that requires three voters to petition their local election boards.”
Stein only has to close the gap by around 20,000 votes around the state to make the statewide automatic recount happen. In other words the Pennsylvania statewide recount effort is still just getting underway. Days after Wisconsin jacked up the price of its own recount by nearly three million extra dollars, in a rather blatant effort at forcing Stein to use up all her raised money, Pennsylvania decided to arbitrarily demand that Stein cough up an immediate $1 million bond. That was also rather clearly a stunt aimed at bankrupting her. So she instead withdrew her current court petition in favor of the new strategy.
Jill Stein is holding a press conference in fron off Meanwhile, Philadelphia has already begun a voluntary recount without Stein even having to ask.
