Jill Stein’s attempts to secure presidential election recounts hit hurdles in Pennsylvania on Monday, while a furious Donald Trump began raising money to “fight back” against the efforts to review his victory.

Stein was scrambling to recruit more than 25,000 supporters to submit affidavits requesting recounts on her behalf to local elections officials in Pennsylvania, which does not allow the kind of statewide request she submitted in Wisconsin last week.

The Green party candidate’s team said by early afternoon that it had managed to file requests in only about 100 of Pennsylvania’s 9,163 electoral precincts. Three voters in each precinct must submit a notarized request for a recount to be triggered. Deadlines to submit these petitions vary across the state.



“The deadline is happening as we speak, and [there are] different deadlines in different districts. That deadline could very well be Monday. It could be Tuesday,” Stein said in a video message to supporters. “There are some districts where the deadline has already passed.”

Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, said counties could reject recount requests after waiting five days following the computation of their results, and that this had passed in some areas.

“We’ve learned that many counties have completed their certification, thereby closing the 5-day window to petition at the county level for a recount,” Murren said in a statement.

Stein also filed a deadline-day petition to a state court in order to contest the election result in the event that recounts that do take place indicate that “computer intrusions or hacking of electronic election systems impacted the results”.

The petition, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, cited concerns about “the discontinuity between pre-election polls and the result,” in addition to US government warnings about Russian cyber-hacking and expert testimony about the vulnerability of some electronic voting machines used in the US.

Stein’s moves came as Trump’s aides launched a “recount defense fund”, branding the effort to recount the vote in states where he narrowly triumphed over Hillary Clinton as a political ploy to divide the US. Clinton’s campaign has said it will cooperate with the effort, which is being spearheaded by the Green party.



An email to Trump’s supporters asks for contributions from $5 to $200 or more but is vague about what the money will be used for, other than “to ensure that the recount process is done fairly”.

Election officials in Wisconsin are expected to meet on Monday to discuss a possible schedule for a recount of that state’s presidential votes, after Stein filed a petition last Friday alleging without evidence that foreign hackers could have submitted bogus absentee ballots.

Stein has also pledged to seek a recount in Michigan, where Trump was officially certified as the winner on Monday. Wednesday is the deadline in Michigan for requesting a recount.

The email from Chris Carr, political director of the Republican National Committee, describes the recount effort, which has so far raised $6m for the three states, as “ridiculous”, “meaningless” and “a political ploy by the left to further divide our country, gin up support from their extremist base, and threaten President-elect Trump’s mandate”.

Carr writes: “Please contribute to our Recount Defense Fund to help us fight back against Hillary Clinton and her allies as they drag our country through a pointless recount.”

Noting that the Clinton campaign has admitted there is no actionable evidence of hacking of voting machines, the email adds: “This recount is nothing but a distraction – and a preview of the lengths to which liberals are willing to go over the next four years to try to stop us.

“But now that the recount is set to take place, we need to be ready to fight back and win, just like we did during the campaign. With you on our side we will be successful in once again stopping Hillary and her far-left pals from dividing our country even more. Contribute $10, $25, $50, $100, $200, or more today to help.”

Clinton is leading Trump in the popular vote by more than 2 million votes nationwide, but Trump won in the electoral college by 306-232. In Wisconsin, Trump bettered Clinton by 27,257 votes; Stein received 30,980 and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, received 106,442.

Carr’s email claims that Trump “won in an electoral landslide” and this is a moment when the country should unite. “Can you imagine what would be happening if it were President-elect Trump contesting an election that was decided three weeks ago? We know the answer … The media would be eating him alive.”



Now the first recount is set to take place, he adds, “we have to fight this fight. We have to ensure that the recount process is done fairly.” Contributions will “help us cover the costs”, he says.

There has been no evidence of widespread tampering or hacking by Russians or others that would upend the election result, and few experts expect the recount to put Clinton in the White House. Her team acknowledged that the Republican has a bigger lead in all three states than has ever been overcome in a presidential recount.

Like her filing in Wisconsin last week, Stein’s petition to the Pennsylvania court featured an affidavit from J Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan’s center for computer security.

Stein said she was filing the petition because Monday was the deadline to do so, but asked Pennsylvania authorities to effectively place it on hold pending the findings of the recounts her campaign manages to secure around the state.

“In the event that the recounts in Pennsylvania and elsewhere yield no additional proof that the 2016 Presidential Election was illegal and the return was not correct, Petitioners may withdraw this Petition to Contest,” Monday’s filing said.

Murren, the spokeswoman for Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, said officials were “working to gather information from the 67 counties regarding their progress in certifying election returns.” She said recount petitions were known to have been filed in the counties of Berks, Bucks, Centre, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.

The fund is the latest aggressive response from the Trump camp. The president-elect himself has fired off a series of tweets including a claim, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally and cost him the popular vote.

On Sunday night he posted: “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California – so why isn’t the media reporting on this? Serious bias – big problem!”

Donald Trump falsely claimed on Sunday that millions of people had voted illegally in the election. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Critics quickly dismissed Trump’s claim as a wild conspiracy theory from the far-right fringe, typical of those he propagated during the campaign. It earned a maximum “four Pinocchios” from the Washington Post’s fact-checker, which said the yarn began with Gregg Phillips, “a self-described conservative voter fraud specialist” who refused to provide his data.

Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state, said: “It appears that Mr Trump is troubled by the fact that a growing majority of Americans did not vote for him. His unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in California and elsewhere are absurd. His reckless tweets are inappropriate and unbecoming of a president-elect.”

James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, told CNN that he had “not seen any voter irregularity in the millions. I don’t know what he was talking about on that one.”

The recount process is complicated and time consuming. In Pennsylvania, at least three people in each of the at least 9,175 voting districts must sign and submit an affidavit requesting a recount. The Stein campaign has posted the affidavits online and is also requesting volunteers to observe the recount, if it takes place.

The Michigan recount, if it goes forward, will require a hand count of the 4,799,284 ballots cast in the presidential election.



On Monday, Trump officially won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, becoming the first Republican presidential nominee to win the state since 1988. The board of state canvassers certified Trump’s 10,704-vote victory nearly three weeks after the election. The two-tenths of a percentage point margin out of nearly 4.8 million votes is the closest presidential race in Michigan in more than 75 years.

On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said Stein, “the Hillary people” and others have to decide whether they are going to back a peaceful transition “or if they’re going to be a bunch of crybabies and sore losers about an election that they can’t turn around”.



Clinton’s counsel, Marc Elias, who initially announced that Clinton would participate, putting her at odds with the White House, responded to the criticism by tweeting: “We are getting attacked for participating in a recount that we didn’t ask for by the man who won election but thinks there was massive fraud.”

Asked about Trump’s claim of illegal voting, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said: “I think I would refer you to the president-elect’s team for commentary on his tweets.” He added: “There has been no evidence produced to substantiate a claim like that.”

Earnest declined to offer an opinion on the recount. “The president’s determined to put his institutional responsibilities as president of the United States ahead of his own personal feelings and ahead of his political preferences,” he said.

Election law varies in each state as to when a recount can occur, how a recount should be conducted and what time frame it should follow, Earnest continued. “The president’s expectation is that state and local election officials all across the country will fulfill their institutional responsibilities.”

In Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, he noted, there is “a very clear set of rules that they should follow and the president’s expectation is that’s what they should do”.

Additional reporting by Amanda Holpuch in New York.