Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks in Oakland, Calif. | AP Photo RNC fundraises off Jill Stein recount effort

The Republican National Committee is fundraising off the recount that Jill Stein, who ran for president with the Green Party, initiated in Wisconsin.

Describing Stein and the Green Party as Hillary Clinton’s “allies on the left” and the recount as “meaningless,” an email from the RNC requested list subscribers to donate to a “Recount Defense Fund.”


“[H]elp us fight back against Hillary Clinton and her allies as they drag our country through a pointless recount,” the email from Chris Carr, the RNC’s political director, said.

Following a report that some experts had spoken to the Clinton campaign about initiating a recount in some key states, Stein raised several million dollars and successfully called for a recount of Wisconsin’s votes late last week. She has said she would like to push for similar efforts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, states that Donald Trump also won by small margins and helped win him the presidency.

There is no evidence, however, that voting machines in Wisconsin or elsewhere were hacked or that there was widespread voter fraud, and the White House has gone out of its way to affirm that the election results are legitimate. The Clinton campaign has said it will participate in the recount through sending its attorneys to the proceedings, but has not alleged any hacking.

The RNC, for its part, noted this: “Even Hillary’s legal counsel admitted that there is no ‘actionable evidence of hacking’ of voting machines,” Carr wrote.

He added: “This recount is nothing but a distraction -- and a preview of the lengths to which liberals are willing to go over the next four years to try to stop us.”

While any suggestions that the election results are illegitimate remain totally unsubstantiated, the Republican president-elect himself waded into the fray on Sunday, when he went off on the recount request on Twitter. After criticizing Clinton for participating in the Stein recount effort, Trump went on to propagate a baseless conspiracy theory that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally.

That false claim, in addition to being a stunning departure from presidential decorum, also raised eyebrows because, as some observers noted, it seemed to offer an argument in favor of recounting the vote.