At a press conference this afternoon, George Martin of the Wisconsin Green Party's coordinating council announced the Green Party had filed for a recount of the state's presidential election votes. The party had raised $5 million in three days, more than it had during the entire presidential campaign. The target, originally $2.5 million, has now been raised to $6-7 million.

Martin displayed charts provided him by the national party that, he said, showed excess variation between exit polls and election results in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The variations were at a level that should occur only “once in every 850 presidential elections," Martin stated.

"Something smells a little fishy, but we don’t know what it is," he said.

Addressing how any excess funds raised as part of this effort would be spent, Martin explained [my transcript of the CBS video]:

Martin: Our commitment as the Green Party is that if we didn’t get on the ballot, let's say in Michigan, and there was money raised, that that money will go to campaign schools next year, to groom local candidates. The last time we did that in Wisconsin I think was about 2000, 20003, the next year we had 37 elected officials in the state of Wisconsin. As a national party our commitment is not only to run at the national level, but more importantly, to build at the local level and build political careers, and so that's where these dollars and these excess dollars will go in the future for next year. You know, this differentiation here, one of the things that really important, we know that our US government monitors elections all around the world, and by their standards, looking at this kind of math, our election in the US would have been called a failed and unfair and illicit election. Our US government would judge that if this happened in another country, and that's all the more reason why we're standing up and going forward with this. … So this is not a grandstand, I'm just letting you know who we are, what we stand for, and how we're moving forward to build a movement. It wasn't about this election. It's about building a movement with integrity for the American public, and so we're going to proceed in that fashion. Question: Did I hear you correctly? Excess funds will be used for candidate recruitment? Martin: Yes. Not for for candidate recruitment, for candidate schools… even before this, the commitment was to help fund schools around the country. Question: [partly unintelligible] …when speaking to a Democratic donor who, let's say, says "We're giving you money because we want a better understanding of the process, but we're not comfortable with their money go to recruiting Green Party members." Martin: Well, but that's their decision. We have already collected enough money to do these filings. We've collected over $4 million since Wednesday. That'll cover our filings in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. So I'm not saying, do not donate to the Green Party, I'm saying it's a matter of your own judgment, but what I'm saying is, this is our commitment, and was our commitment prior to this issue of recall.

As a career environmentalist, I've been a strong critic of the Green Party since 2000 and Ralph Nader's surreal claim that George W. Bush would be better for the environment than Al Gore. In 2016, the Greens' message remained the same, that Trump would be better for America than Clinton. As in 2000, the result this year was that left-leaning third-party voters led by Jill Stein put a Republican in the White House. So it was with massive unease I donated to their recount effort at their website. I did so only because, as CBS points out:

Stein’s donation page says that any extra dollars not devoted to the recount will “go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.”

I now feel sickened. The funds I donated may very well end up helping them reelect Trump in 2020.