Pennsylvania certified its 2016 election results Monday — but Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein isn’t giving up her challenge of how the state counts and recounts the votes.

“In Pennsylvania, we are planning to proceed in federal court with an examination and a challenge to what we think is a byzantine and unworkable recount regime,” campaign attorney Jonathan Abady told reporters during a phone call.

Unlike its efforts in a federal suit filed late last month, the campaign won’t seek to contest the 2016 vote tallies. Its attempt to do so was rejected Monday by U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond.

Instead, the campaign will turn its efforts toward future elections, by seeking to overhaul recount procedures and its use of paperless voting machines.

“We need to put an end to the use of these black-box machines,” Stein said, referring to paperless electronic voting machines — like those used in Allegheny and most other counties — which don’t retain a paper record of a voter’s preferences. Critics of such machines say they are vulnerable to tampering because if the results are changed, it can be impossible to detect the alteration.

Stein also seeks an “automatic audit,” which would verify that the voting machines’ programming has not been altered. Allegheny County has such a procedure, which it carries out on 20 randomly selected machines out of the more than 4,000 it uses. But it is the only county in the state that does so.

The Stein campaign also hopes to make it easier for voters to call for a recount. In terms of such procedures, “Pennsylvania was, I think, the worst state” of the three the Greens challenged this fall, said Abady. Compared to Wisconsin and Michigan, the Keystone State “presented the most problems and was most disturbing.”

The state carries out automatic recounts if a race is close enough, but otherwise recounts take place at the precinct-by-precinct level, when three voters in a given district petition for the retabulation. There are 9,000 precincts across the state, meaning a statewide recount would require recruiting 27,000 voters evenly distributed across the state.

The Stein campaign inspired scattered recount efforts in several counties, and it also organized a Commonwealth Court lawsuit to contest the results statewide. But the latter effort was dropped when the court required the plaintiffs — over 100 voters who joined in the effort — to post a $1 million bond.

Stein today said it was unfair to ask voters to undertake “a bake sale on steroids” to pursue concerns about an election.

Those arguments did not impress federal district Judge Paul Diamond, who on Monday rejected the campaign’s efforts to compel a recount. He noted that the Commonwealth Court bond ruling said “it would change the bond amount upon good cause shown,’” but the Stein campaign did not attempt to reduce the bond.

Abady said that given the short timeframe, “I don’t think we had the luxury of deliberating on whether we could challenge the bond. ... We were very much in a double-bind and a catch-22,” and “It wasn’t even clear that Jill Stein could post that bond” on the voters’ behalf.

In any case, Abady said the lawsuit will not seek to overturn Judge Diamond’s ruling. Instead, he said, it will “seek federal relief for what we perceive to be the constitutional infirmities that exist in the current Pennsylvania landscape.”

He said that the constitutional right to vote, as well as due process and equal-protection rights that require voters to be treated equally, argued for better voting machines and a more consistent approach to recount efforts.

Judge Diamond saw things differently. In his ruling, he argued that “the right to have one’s vote counted does not ... encompass the right to have one’s vote verified through a mandatory statewide recount.”

But Stein vowed to fight on. While recount efforts “may have stopped,” she said, “the movement for a voting system that we can trust has been enormously energized and launched in a very big way.” — (AP)