Jill Stein and the Green Party have officially filed a request to have the ballots in the 2016 presidential election is Wisconsin recounted.
The official Wisconsin Elections Commission Twitter account tweeted:
The Commission has received the Stein and Del La Fuente recount petitions. Details and news release posted soon at https://t.co/N3TrlOIqE1.
— Wisconsin Elections (@WI_Elections) November 25, 2016
Jill Stein has requested a full recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin, alleging that foreign hackers could have skewed the result by obtaining the state’s voter database and then filing bogus absentee ballots.
Stein, the Green party’s candidate in the presidential election, formally filed for a recount with Wisconsin authorities shortly before the state’s 5pm deadline on Friday. She also planned to request recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania in the coming days.
Wisconsin’s election board agreed on Friday to the statewide recount. The process, including an examination by hand of the nearly 3 million ballots tabulated in the state, is expected to begin late next week after Stein’s campaign has paid the required fee, the Elections Commission said.
The state faces a 13 December federal deadline to complete the recount, which may require canvassers in Wisconsin’s 72 counties to work evenings and weekends to finish the job in time, according to the commission.
The Wisconsin filing, a copy which was obtained by the Guardian, focuses on a “significant increase in the number of absentee voters as compared to the last general election”. It had been thought that it would instead focus on the scale of Donald Trump’s victories in counties using only electronic voting.
“This significant increase could be attributed to a breach of the state’s electronic voter database,” Stein said in her petition regarding the rise in the number of absentee ballot filings. Trump won a narrow victory in the state against Hillary Clinton, surprising pollsters.
The 64-page recount filing contains an affidavit from J Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan’s centre for computer security, who is an expert on election integrity.
“One explanation for the results of the 2016 presidential election is that cyberattacks influenced the result,” Halderman writes in his five-page account.
Halderman said the hacking theory was “plausible” because other cyberattacks took place during the election campaign, some voting machines used in the US are highly vulnerable, and skilled hackers could change the result and “leave no outwardly visible evidence”.
