OPINION:
Wisconsin’s recount efforts ended Monday, with President-elect Donald Trump gaining 131 votes over Hillary Clinton.
“Completing this recount was a challenge, but the real winners are the voters,” Elections Commission Chairman Mark Thomsen said in a statement after signing off on the statewide results. “Based on the recount, they can have confidence that Wisconsin’s election results accurately reflect the will of the people, regardless of whether they are counted by hand or by machine.”
Green Party candidate Jill Stein can now relax. The $3.5 million she forked over for the recount confirmed the validity of the result. Mr. Thomsen also said there was no evidence any of the voting machines were hacked or tampered with. Russians be damned.
In Pennsylvania — where Ms. Stein also asked for a paper ballot recount — a federal judge rebuked the request. The courts also rejected her petition for a recount in Michigan last week.
Ms. Stein argued without evidence — and with only collecting about 1 percent of the vote in these states — that the state’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking.
In Pennsylvania, U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond said there were at least six grounds for rejecting Mrs. Stein’s request, and suspicion of a hacked Pennsylvania election “borders on the irrational,” he wrote in a 31-page decision issued Monday.
“Most importantly, there is no credible evidence that any ‘hack’ occurred, and compelling evidence that Pennsylvania’s voting system was not in any way compromised,” Judge Diamond wrote. He also said the lawsuit suffered from a lack of standing, potentially the lack of federal jurisdiction and an “unexplained, highly prejudicial” wait before filing last week’s lawsuit, four weeks after the Nov. 8 election.
Even some Democrats called the recount efforts a waste of time.
“Jill Stein has not cited in Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania any explicit, concrete evidence that there was fraud,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said in an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis earlier this month.
“In fact, the secretary of state of Pennsylvania, who is under a Democratic governor and who was coincidentally my secretary of state when I was governor, says there’s no evidence of any voter fraud,” Mr. Rendell added.
“So I think the suits are a waste of time, they are not going to change the results,” he added.
They didn’t. Can we now put this anti-Trump hysteria to bed?
Probably not.
The Democrats have now turned to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee as evidence to delegitimize Mr. Trump’s win. Their quest will continue — because it’s all they have. Their party is in shambles, suffering in the minority in both in the House and Senate as well as many state legislatures.
For them, it’s easier to point the finger to others as the reason why they lost, instead of doing some deep soul-searching.
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