1-26-2017 note from Jill Stein with PA, WI, MI Recount updates:

When we decided to initiate a recount, together with over 10,000 volunteers and 161,000 donors, we knew it wouldn’t be easy.But we had little idea how hard the political establishment would fight against transparent, accountable elections.

In Michigan, Trump’s GOP cronies stopped the recount despite – or maybe because of – revelations about major problems with the vote count, particularly in under-resourced black and brown communities.

In Wisconsin, although the law was on our side, many low-income communities of color most vulnerable to tampering never got the hand recount needed to verify the vote.

But the worst mess was in Pennsylvania, where over 80% of voters use touch-screen machines with no tangible paper backup. These paperless voting machines are so vulnerable to hacking and so difficult to verify that they have been banned in most states.

To make things worse, Pennsylvania law makes it virtually impossible for citizens to know whether their votes are actually counted. Thousands of volunteers mobilized in days to petition for recounts – only to be thwarted by a nightmare of bureaucracy.

This is the sorry state of democracy in America today. 240 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, we do not have a voting system where we can insure that the results are legitimate – unlike most Western democracies, where recounts are routine in close elections.

We are determined to end this travesty, and to leverage the lessons of the recount to win concrete, urgently needed voting justice reforms.

At the very outset of the recount, we filed a federal lawsuit declaring the state of Pennsylvania is failing to protect its citizens’ constitutional right to vote. That suit has finally come up for a hearing, enabling us to utilize our volunteers’ painstaking work to challenge Pennsylvania’s regime of undemocratic, non-transparent and unaccountable elections.

Thank you for leading the charge.

Jill Stein

It’s in our hands!