Jill Stein Cites Hacking Concerns as Reason for Recounts, Not Election Outcome

Former presidential candidate Jill Stein and the Green Party are raising money to file recount votes in three states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Stein insists she doesn’t want to change the outcome of the election, but instead she wants to root out fraud.

“We’re going to the three states that are most likely to show hacking because they had razor-thin margins, because they have corrupt voting machines… In Wisconsin they use voting machines that are illegal to use in California because they are so tamper-friendly. They are wide open, they’re an invitation to tampering,” Stein explained to the FOX Business Network’s Kennedy.

While Stein acknowledged she has no hard evidence of hacking in these states, she cited examples of election-related hacking as a reason to file for recounts.

“I am convinced, and it didn’t start in this election, that we have a very vulnerable, wide-open voting system. These electronic voting machines are basically a black box. They are an invitation to tampering. We’ve seen it over and over again and in this election… You won’t see the hacking unless you look for it.”

She added: “What’s justification is that you saw the Democratic Party database hacked into, right? We saw private emails hacked into and we saw the voter database hacked into in Arizona, Illinois—that’s proven, this is not conjecture.”

The former presidential candidate clarified that she is not referring to the election system, but rather a “state database of voters.”

“That’s not what you vote on, this is like who is registered to vote,” she said. “We know there was hacking all around the periphery of this election and we know that outdated, insecure 10-year-old voting machines without security are being used all over the place, most vulnerable in these three states.”

Stein stated that her campaign’s lawyers have contacted the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Gary Johnson. The Clinton campaign said it will join Stein in recount efforts, though the Green Party candidate said they “are not coordinating” with Clinton.

“This is not a partisan action here—this is on the behalf of very frustrated, cynical, disappointed voters who… said they were disgusted by the process of this election. And unhappy with the candidates and unhappy with the dialogue, unhappy with the whole thing. And very unhappy with these voting machines that we saw being hacked,” she said.