I don’t support Jill Stein’s call for a recount the election results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There are multiple reasons why I think Jill Stein is going about this the wrong way.
1. Jill Stein has no chance of winning the three states in question.
Jill Stein will not be the next president of the United States. She got less than 2% in all of these states. If Hillary Clinton wanted to pursue a recount in Michigan which was won by Trump by probably under 1% (right now Trump has a lead of just 11,612 votes), I could understand that decision, especially if Michigan was all Clinton needed to be president. I know that the probability of 11,612 being incorrectly counted is low, but if the presidency was decided by less than 0.0001 of the votes cast I think it the results should be verified. But I think the Clinton campaign probably considered a recount and decided it would not change the outcome so it wasn’t worth the money, time, and controversy. But a candidate who at most got 1.1% in the states questioned shouldn’t throw a fit. I don’t think its her place to call for a recount. I would have had the same opinion if Gary Johnson had tried a similar approach in light of a Clinton Presidency.
2. If the election was hacked a recount would probably not catch it.
Let’s say the electronic votes were tampered. I don’t believe this happened at all but let’s entertain the idea for a second. If the machines were hacked they would have probably changed the record of the vote which is all that is analyzed in a simple recount. A recount is just recounting the votes. An audit would maybe have caught it, if this hack had taken place. But audits are expensive and a far more sensible explanation for a Trump win in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is that turnout was down in urban areas where Obama got a lot of support. I am not denying that foreign interests tried to influence the election, like the creation of fake news by teenagers in Macedonia (here is an article about that: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-news-macedonia-teen-shows-how-its-done/). The lower turnout compared to 2008 probably hurt Clinton. At the end of the day it appears that more republicans turned out to vote than democrats. Nate Silver (a democrat) wrote about the possible hacking claims here: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/demographics-not-hacking-explain-the-election-results/.
3. This process isn’t helping the division in this country.
The recount isn’t going to change anything. Trump won. Trump may have not been the candidate you would have picked. Personally I would have wanted any other republican candidate from the nomination process. This recount is just making things worse. Jill Stein should want our country to come together and accept the results. Her own VP pick doesn’t approve of this process. Instead of escalating the situation Jill Stein should stop fighting.
The bottom line is that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. All this talk about a rigged election was not backed by any evidence. Trump shouldn’t have called the election rigged. Stein shouldn’t do the same thing. I would have supported a recount if we had a 2000 situation with the election decided by 121 votes, regardless of the winner. But given the situation a recount is unnecessary and wasteful. I know that you may not trust Statisticians right now because we were wrong about the election, but still listen to the multiple voices speaking out against the recount. It’s time for our country to unite and accept what happened on November 8, 2016.