Jill Stein’s efforts to recount the votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — key battleground states of Election 2016 — seems to be on the road to success in its fundraising stage. Citing a need for assistance to “ensure the integrity of our elections,” a crowdfunding effort was started on Stein’s website that reached $350,000 when we first reported it on Wednesday. By midnight, the total had dwarfed that multiple times over according to The Guardian:
Before midnight EST on Wednesday, the drive had already raised more than the $2m necessary to file for a recount in Wisconsin, where the deadline to challenge is on Friday. The campaign had reached $3m by 10am EST.
Stein said she was acting due to “compelling evidence of voting anomalies” and that data analysis had indicated “significant discrepancies in vote totals” that were released by state authorities.
“These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified,” she said in a statement. “We deserve elections we can trust.”
The fundraising page said it expected to need around $6m-7m to challenge the results in all three states.
Stein’s efforts have clearly not gone unnoticed and the fundraising page celebrated the mark by urging people to keep the donations pouring in:
Congratulations on meeting the recount costs for Wisconsin! Raising money to pay for the first round so quickly is a miraculous feat and a tribute to the power of grassroots organizing.
Now that we have completed funding Wisconsin’s recount (which is due on Friday), we can begin to tackle the funding for Pennsylvania’s recount (due Monday) and then Michigan’s recount (due Wednesday).
Beating the Friday deadline was the biggest hurdle for the fundraiser at this point, but there is still a lot of work to be done even if all the funds are raised by the respective deadlines. There’s also plenty of skepticism that a recount would change the results of the election. The current fundraising tally stands at a little over $3,200,000 and is quickly growing.
(Via The Guardian / CNN)