Well, this is disheartening.

Over at Medium, Nick Sharp, a man who volunteered as an observer with Recount Michigan 2016, described his experience. TL;DR: It does not sound positive. In fact, before the count was suspended by a federal judge, Sharp called it a "bloodbath."

He starts by setting the scene:

Trump’s legal team was there in force, circling the room like sharks. They were challenging everything, gumming up the works and disqualifying whole precincts. I was only aware of a single Green Party attorney plus one law student in my (large) room. Many challenges had one or more Trump lawyers speaking with election officials, and no legal advocate present for the other side; they were simply outnumbered and outgunned.

He goes on to write that every table had 1-2 Trump representatives present, who would read lengthy, loud objections to every step of the process. As a consequence, not much was getting done.

Around the time our first box was finally getting unsealed, an exasperated election official shouted an announcement to the room. It was a large room and there were many people in it — he would have needed to shout anyway — but his frustration was clear. He had the air of a normally calm civic bureaucrat trying to do his job and get the votes counted on time, but who had been pushed to the breaking point by Trump’s lawyers and their delay tactics.

The election official announced that Trump’s head lawyer had just filed a blanket challenge in Lansing. So, (here, I’m paraphrasing from memory) “All precincts have already been challenged. You don’t have to read your scripts anymore, we’re not writing down the challenges. If you still want to read them, go ahead and read them.” (Shouting louder) “But we’re not writing them down any more. If you tell us to write them down,” (He raised his arms) “We’re not gonna do it!”

In his entire four hour shift, he did not count a single vote.

In response, Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate who filed for the recount, said "this fight is the right one and it's only just begun." She said that her team would be huddling with their attorneys to "figure out the best course forward."

In related news, Trump supporters in Wisconsin are — unsuccessfully, so far — trying to stop the recount in progress there. You have to wonder why certain people are trying so hard to stop these recounts from happening.



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Laura Beck Laura Beck is a Los Angeles-based TV writer and frequent contributor to Cosmopolitan.com — her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Jezebel, and the Village Voice.

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