UPDATE: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has filed a request for a recount with Wisconsin election officials.
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Jill Stein, who ran for president as the Green Party candidate, is seeking a recount of the votes in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, her campaign said on Wednesday.
Donald Trump's margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was narrow in all three states, which were expected to vote Democratic, and the results have become the focus of speculation — based on little proof — that the vote may have been tampered with. Stein acknowledged those fears in her statement announcing the recount drive.
"After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual email accounts are causing many American to wonder if our election results are reliable," Stein said. "These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust."
The deadline for filing for a recount in Wisconsin is Friday at a cost of $1.1 million. Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, are raising money to fund the effort. As of Friday morning, they have collected $4.8 million.
"Now that we have completed funding Wisconsin's recount (where we will file on Friday) and funding Pennsylvania's recount (due Monday), we will focus on raising the needed funds for Michigan's recount (due Wednesday)," Stein said on her website Friday.
Stein's move follows a New York magazine report that some computer scientists have been urging Democrat Hillary Clinton to ask for the recount in the three states. The article questioned the deviation in election results from predictions in polls.
J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, confirmed on Medium that he had been in touch with the Clinton campaign but said his views had been misrepresented and it was "probably not" true that the election was hacked.
"I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than the election was hacked," he wrote.
But he also said that the only way to know whether a cyberattack changed the result was to examine the paper ballots and voting equipment in the three states.
President-elect Donald Trump beat Clinton with 290 electoral votes to Clinton's 232, with Michigan outstanding. Clinton has a lead of more than 2 million popular votes.
The deadline in Pennsylvania is Monday and Wednesday in Michigan.
Halderman, who also is director of Michigan's Center for Computer Security and Society, wrote that many states continue to use voting machines that are known to be insecure and that can be infected with vote-stealing malware. Checking the paper record in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan would allow voters to be confident the results were counted correctly, he wrote.
"Examining the physical evidence in these states?—?even if it finds nothing amiss?—?will help allay doubt and give voters justified confidence that the results are accurate," Halderman wrote.
An article on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website, which predicted the race incorrectly, cast doubt on concerns about tampering with the electronic voting machines. Demographics explain the results, Carl Bialik and Rob Arthur wrote.
"We've looked into the claim — or at least, our best guess of what's being claimed based on what has been reported — and statistically, it doesn't check out," they wrote.
