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An attorney for Green Party candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Monday in Commonwealth Court asking for a recount of Pennsylvania's 2016 presidential election.

(The Patriot-News, file)

An attorney for Green Party candidate Jill Stein filed a petition Monday in state Commonwealth Court asking for a recount of Pennsylvania's 2016 presidential election.

In the last week, Stein raised $6.2 million in order to launch recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states that President-elect Donald Trump won by about 1 percentage point. In the Keystone State, the businessman received about 70,000 more votes than Clinton. Stein garnered less than 50,000 votes.

One of the chief factors cited attorney Lawrence Otter's petition include problems with the state's electronic voting system that a computer scientist believes could make it vulnerable to hackers. Others include the computer hacking of the Democratic National Committee and "discontinuity" between pre-election public opinion polls and the final result.

"A primary purpose of the recounts now being requested, petitioners believe, is or should be to determine if computer intrusions or hacking of electronic election systems impacted the results in the 2016 presidential election," Otter wrote, in the filing.

Under state law, a recount is mandatory in elections decided by a margin of less than half a percentage point. Clinton currently trails Trump by more than a percentage point.

The recount could potentially be hampered by the age and technical realities of the voting machines. Most do not create a paper trail of individual votes cast, so there won't be a ballot-by-ballot recount like the one carried out in Florida after the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

That fact was cited by Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan science professor whose affidavit was included in Monday's filing.

"Forensic examination of the equipment is the only way to assure that the machines were not manipulated in a cyberattack," Halderman said. "Paper ballots, paper audit trails and voting equipment will only be examined in this manner if there is a recount."

Marc Elias, a Clinton campaign attorney, said the Democratic nominee's team would back the recount push and wished for a fair process.

"Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves," Elias wrote, "but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides."

The Stein camp's petition came hours before the deadline for requesting such a recount.

On a county level, voters have five days from the date the results were certified to file a petition for recount. That deadline has already passed in many counties.

Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said Monday that it would be working with counties to parse through the petitions.

"We are aware of petitions filed in Berks, Bucks, Centre, Montgomery and Philadelphia," Murren said, in a written statement. "However, we are not aware of how many have been filed in each county. We have been working to gather that information from the counties. Becaus the department is not the filing agency, we are relying on reports from the counties."

The court filing is included in its entirety below.

Pennsylvania Recount petition by PennLive on Scribd

This article was updated to include comment from a Department of State spokeswoman.