Some people are criticizing your motives for doing this recount. They’re characterizing it as sort of penance for Clinton losing the election. If Hillary had won, and Trump was in her position today, with those slim margins, would you have demanded a recount too?

If the same indicators were there—that there were thin margins, that there were states where the votes went the opposite way than expected, and there were vulnerabilities in the voting system, absolutely. Greens have done this before. Election integrity is really important to us. We launched the recount campaign in 2004 in Ohio because there were real concerns about the reliability of the vote, and we actually found problems. And those voting machines have not gotten better. They’re still there. So there’s very good reasons to still have concerns. Whenever I was asked during the campaign, would I stand up for a recount if there were questions, I’d always say, “Yes, and it doesn’t matter which candidate was the winner, because it’s the process that counts, and it’s the process that our faith has to be restored in.”

Even if Donald Trump’s policies went against the majority of what the Green Party stood for, you’d still fight the result of that election?

Throughout the election, I maintained that these were both candidates that don’t serve the American people. And if you look at public-opinion polls, they were the most disliked and untrusted candidates in American history. And if you actually look at their policies, there’s real problems, serious problems, on both sides. It’s a slightly different mix, but in my view, this is a lose-lose proposition. That’s my personal view, that’s why I’m a member of an independent party. That’s why I’m not working here to assist one or the other.

I wanted to address the issue of money, because that’s a question that’s been floating around lately. People are really concerned with where the money that you have raised is going to go, and why the number keeps fluctuating. If you raise more money than what actually ends up going into the recount, what is that money going to go towards?

I’ll be clear that the rules of the F.E.C. are that if you’re going to do a recount, you have to have a special designated account. That money is segregated. That money cannot be spent on the campaign, it cannot be spent on the party, it cannot be spent on other candidates. It has to be spent on the recount.

Since we launched this, the price tag has been going up. The state of Wisconsin first said that the filing fee would be worth $1.1 million. Now it is $3.5 million. We were totally shocked by that. We learned that the night before last. In Michigan, we are now also told, it’s going up. A lot. We don’t know how much. It started at around half a million, they advised us. Now it’s at least $1 million and potentially a good deal more.

Regardless of how the recount ends, the unprecedented nature of this effort is inevitably going to raise questions about future election results. So what would you like to see happen in 2018, 2020, and beyond?

That’s really what we want to come out of this. We want to come out of this with changes to our voting system that allow the voters to be confident. That means we get rid of these electronic machines—the touch screens where it all feels kind of weird because you don’t have a physical thing you vote on. Many times they don’t have any paper. Sometimes they do but the paper is hard to read, and they don’t keep well. And almost impossible to count. So we need to get rid of those machines. They are error prone and able to be hacked. Let’s use plain old paper ballots, we fill out the oval, and we still put them into the scanner. We still have to do an audit to make sure that it’s all working properly, to cross-check the whole process against an actual hand-counted paper ballot, and when the elections are really close, you do a recount. That’s what needs to come out of this and I hope that a greater sense—that we can do something positive.

We also need a voting system that lets us vote for what we want instead of against what we fear. If the question is “Who are you most afraid of?,” that’s not good for democracy. A democracy needs values, it needs a moral compass. We have to be able to take our values into the voting booth. There’s a system that works for this, it’s called ranked-choice voting. Maine just passed it—it’s already in use in several cites but it’s the first time it’s been enacted on a state level. It lets you go into a voting booth and instead of just voting for one person, you can rank your choices. So if your first choice loses—say you vote for an underdog that you really like who has your view of health care or student debt or of higher public education, you could actually vote for what you want with the assurance that if your first choice loses, your vote is automatically assigned to your second choice. So it’s a win-win situation, and it lets people stop worrying about splitting the vote or somebody spoiling the election.