Bill Laitner

Detroit Free Press

Calling the state's handling of the November election "a hot mess," Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein stood Saturday outside Cobo Center in Detroit to thank her supporters and say she was giving up on Michigan's short-lived recount but not on the causes of her campaign.

"We are fighting for the right to vote and to make sure that every vote counts," said Stein, 66, who triggered historic recount efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin after voters in those states shifted to Republican after many years of voting Democratic.

Stein is a longtime environmental activist in Boston who graduated from Harvard Medical School, practiced internal medicine for decades and cut four CDs of her guitar music before running for president as a candidate from the antipollution Green Party, according to her campaign website.

Stein chastised state and local election officials in Michigan, as well as state lawmakers, for maintaining election rules and practices that she said were shoddy, inaccurate and vulnerable to tampering and hacking. Moreover, numerous instances of irregularities with how ballots were handled on Election Day cropped up during recounts in Macomb, Oakland, Wayne and Washtenaw counties last week, prompting election officials to say they were unable to recount tens of thousands of ballots.

"Do we have a voting system we can trust?" Stein shouted to the crowd of about 50 gathered in the chill outside Cobo Center's main entrance on Washington Blvd. at Jefferson.

"No!" her supporters shouted back. President-elect Donald Trump's margin over Hillary Clinton in the November election was just more than 10,000 votes in Michigan, according to the Michigan Board of Canvassers, a difference that Stein maintained could easily have been overturned had every voter's intent been counted in Democratic Party strongholds such as Detroit.

Stein said her campaign had paid $1 million to fund the recount — ordered halted last week in two court decisions — and was prepared to pay at least another $1 million to continue it. State and federal judges in Michigan decided that Stein was not an "aggrieved candidate" and thus did not qualify for requesting a recount because — no matter what outcome — she was so far behind the leaders that a recount could not have resulted in her election as president.

"If Hillary Clinton had asked for a recount, she could've gotten it and we'd really know who won Michigan," Stein said. If recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had given the states' electoral votes to Clinton, she would've been elected, Stein has said.

She said Saturday she was leaving Michigan and heading to Wisconsin to oversee that recount.

In the crowd of Stein's supporters stood Joe DeMare, 54, of Bowling Green, Ohio, who held a sign that simply said "Green Party." DeMare said he was a machinist and had driven to Detroit with a friend to show his support for Stein.

"She's fighting the fight we should all be fighting," he said.

Nearby was Joanne Warwick, 52, of Detroit, who wore a button on her lapel that said "Feel the Bern" — a campaign plug for Sen. Bernie Sanders an independent from Vermont, who lost the Democratic Party nomination to Hillary Clinton, a duel that became controversial when e-mails surfaced that showed top party officials evidently trying to edge Sanders out of the race.

"I feel like Bernie got burned," said Warwick, who said she was a lawyer.

"I am right now an independent. I used to be a Democrat," she said.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com.