Michigan officially declared on Monday afternoon that Trump was victorious, opening 48-hour window for challenge

A recount will happen in Wisconsin and Stein will pay; in Michigan she now has 48 hours to ask for one and says she will

She missed state-wide deadline for petition for a recount but her lawyers believe the claims of hacking form a separate legal avenue for them

in bid to force recount there on top of one in Wisconsin

Green Party candidate Jill Stein is using legal papers to claim Pennsylvania's voting machines could have been hacked as she attempts to force a state-wide recount, DailyMail.com has learned.

The move would allow her to get round her failure to meet individual and state-wide deadlines for requests for a recount and is being submitted to a court on Monday afternoon.

She had failed to meet the statewide deadline for a voter-initiated recount, which was Monday November 21, the Philadelphia Inquirer had reported.

Instead she is questioning whether the electronic voting system in the state could have been tampered with as they tallied results - a separate legal avenue, her legal advisers believe.

That would be enough, Stein's camp claim, to force a recount.Her lawyer told DailyMail.com there were four pages of expert evidence that the voting machines used in parts of the state were 'hackable'.

Recount efforts are now moving in three states. As well as Pennsylvania:

In Michigan, Stein has until Wednesday afternoon to file a formal request after Trump was officially declared the winner;

In Wisconsin, officials said they would rush through a recount but would not do it by hand - and stood by the initial result.

The moves came as Trump's aides continued to hammer the effort to force recounts in three states that handed Trump his victory over Hillary Clinton.

Stein raised more than $6 million to fund recounts in Wisconsin, is bringing the legal case in Pennsylvania, and has 48 hours to do the same in Michigan following close and unexpected Trump wins there.

President-elect Donald Trump's campaign spokesman blasted the latest recount effort as 'ridiculous' and said, 'This election's been decided'

What did they talk about: Adam Parkhomenko, who was the founder of Ready For Hillary, tweeted this picture of him with the former First Family apparently meeting in Chappaqua

Hacked? Jill Stein's claims center around the cyber security of the voting machines used in Pennsylvania.

Stein announced her efforts after computer scientists released a study that they wrote showed differences in Trump's margin in counties that used optical scan voting technology as opposed to paper ballots. The study raised the possibility that election systems could have been hacked, but indicated this was unlikely.

However the possibility of hacking appears to be central to Stein's legal case.

'It's going to be a Class II election contest in Pennsylvania, something that's never occurred before,' said Bucks County attorney Lawrence M. Otter, who is working on behalf of the Green Party's recount effort.

'It's basically asking for a recount of a presidential election, statewide.'

The four-page petition includes an 'Exhibit A' that details 'information about the hackability of the electronic voting machine', said Otter.

The move could get Stein out of one difficulty - that she had missed individual deadlines for recounts in some counties, and would not need to find three voters in each district to petition for a recount in each of them.

However a recount in Pennsylvania could raise a number of challenges, according to experts. The state does not back up all of its electronic voting machines with paper ballots, which would make it extremely difficult to conduct a recount.

'The nightmare scenario would be if Pennsylvania decides the election and it is very close. You would have no paper records to do a recount,' said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, in a comment to the Los Angeles Times.

The Green Party has a history of challenging vote results in presidential elections. Still, some critics have dismissed Stein's efforts as a 'gimmick' to help raise money, while others have speculated that the Clinton campaign is using Stein as a cut-out to challenge the election results.

The Clinton camp this weekend announced that it was 'participating' in the effort, but doesn't expect a change in the outcome of the election.

'I really do think that it's been ridiculous that so much oxygen has been given to the recount effort, where there's absolutely no chance of any election results changing,' Trump spokesman Jason Miller told reporters on a conference call Monday.

'This election's been decided. It's a conceded election,' he said.

Miller said Stein was using the recount as a fundraising effort, and noted that Clinton has already conceded the election, but failed to offer specific evidence for Trump's claim that millions of votes cast by illegal immigrants were being counted in Hillary Clinton's popular vote totals.

'So if this much attention and oxygen is going to be given to a completely frivolous, throwaway fundraising scheme by someone like Jill Stein, then there should be actual substantive looks at the overall examples of voter fraud, illegal immigrants voting in recent years,' Miller said. 'And so that's the broader message that I think should be taken away here.'

Stein announced her plan after a report by c omputer scientists including J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, conducted an analysis of the vote.

That analysis indicated that Clinton performed 7 per cent worse in Wisconsin counties that have electronic voting machines than in counties that relied on paper ballots that are logged with an optical scanner.

Trump began bashing the recount effort from his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach over the weekend.

Failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday

IS GEORGE SOROS BEHIND RECOUNT MOVES? The sources of cash for Jill Stein’s recount legal battle – and Hillary Clinton’s involvement in it – have yet to be disclosed. But among the intriguing questions hanging over it is whether George Soros, the billionaire financier, has aided the efforts of either camp. The question is being raised after links between Hillary Clinton’s general counsel, Marc Elias, and Soros were highlighted by Breitbart. Funder: Soros gave to Clinton lawyer Cash: Marc Elias has taken $5m from Soros Elias revealed the Clinton campaign’s involvement in the recount in Wisconsin on Saturday in a blogpost which did not say how it was being funded. But he has previously received large amounts of Soros funding for legal efforts to battle Republican states on voting laws. The Washington Post reported in August that Soros' spokesman said he had given $5 million to trusts used by Elias after the lawyer approached them with a proposal for legal challenges ‘up and down the ballot’ which would be useful to Democrats. Elias had argued that African-Americans and Latinos were illegally excluded from voting by restrictions brought in by Republicans. Ironically, if he got behind a full effort to overturn Wisconsin, it could be based on the opposite assertion – that illegal votes were mistakenly counted. The claim being advanced in Pennsylvania that the machines were hackable is based on work by the National Voting Rights Institute, which is either currently or was previously funded by the Open Society, a Soros –funded organization, and by the also Soros-funded Tides institute. Advertisement

'Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!' he wrote.

Earlier, he suggested he would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college – even as Hillary Clinton's lead over him climbed to 2.2 million ballots. The president-elect provided no evidence of the widespread voter fraud he claimed had occurred.

'In addition to winning the Electoral College by a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,' Trump tweeted.

Miller referenced a Pew Research study that said 24 million, or one out of every eight, voter registrations were 'no longer valid or significantly inaccurate.'

Trump himself has referenced the same study to charge that dead people are voting.

Factcheck.org has written that the study argued for upgrading U.S. voting systems, and referenced the need to purge and improve voter rolls, not to claim that millions of people were voting improperly.

Miller also referenced a '2014 Washington Post study that indicated that more than 14 per cent of noncitizens in both the 2008 and 2010 elections indicated they were registered to vote.'

The article was by two academics who wrote a paper that was contested by some of their colleagues.

Neither report dealt with any voting irregularities in the 2016 election.

'So all of these are studies and examples of where there have been issues of both voter fraud and illegal immigrants voting,' said Miller.

Asked about whether the Justice Department would follow up on the charges of massive voter fraud, Miller said: 'I think it'd be inappropriate for me to speculate as far as Justice Department activity following – after inauguration or after swearing-in and the transfer of power has been completed.'

'Obviously I do think that it's an issue of concern, the fact that there's a concern that so many have voted who were not legally supposed to.'

He mocked the recount story as 'just chasing the shiny object of the Jill Stein recount effort, which is really just a way for Ms. Stein and the Green Party to go and make money.'

After his initial forays about the recount over the weekend, Trump followed up with two more tweets.

He suggested it would have been easier for him to win the popular vote anyways, because he would have just campaigned in a handful of highly-populated states.

'It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4--,' he began. 'states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!' he concluded in the second tweet.

Former White House senior advisor to President Obama Dan Pfeiffer slammed Trump for the unsubstantiated claims. 'We will have a Conspiracy Theorist in charge of our government, our military and our nuclear arsenal. What could possibly go wrong?' Pfieffer wrote.

Explosive: Trump's series of tweets which started the storm over claims of illegal voting

Loving the spotlight: Jill Stein has been given the sort of attention she never got during the campaign. On Wednesday she will appear on The View

Clinton's camp joined Green Party candidate Jill Stein in her efforts for a recount in three major electoral college states; Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said Monday he had 'not seen any voter irregularity in the millions.'

'I don't know what he was talking about on that one,' Lankford told CNN's 'New Day.'

Wisconsin's elections commission voted Monday to approve a recount once payment is received from Stein, who is also pushing for recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where Trump's lead reached nearly 11,000 votes.

'We intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,' said Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias.

In Michigan the state's board of canvassers on Monday certified Trump's 2,279,543 votes to 2,268,839 – a difference of 10,704 votes. He beat her by 47.6 per cent to 47.2 per cent.

The official declaration on Michigan gives Stein a 48-hour window to request a recount, which she said she would do.

In Wisconsin, the recount was given the formal go-ahead but will not be done by hand.

That would need a separate court order, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said, as it also stood by the earlier result.

'If nothing else, this is going to give us a very good audit, it's going to re-assure Wisconsin voters that we have a fair system, that we're not counting illegal votes,' Elections Commission chairman Mark Thomsen said, reported CNN.

Just what Clinton intends to do is unclear but in an intriguing development, she was pictured meeting with Adam Parkhomenko, a key member of her inner circle.

He tweeted the picture of her and Bill Clinton, apparently in Chappaqua, among a series of tweets about the election recount and criticisms of Trump.