Jill Stein May Actually Have a Strategy to Change the Result of the Presidential Election

When I first heard about the recount effort in our recent presidential election, I was a little surprised honestly. Even before the unofficial vote counts were finished in these swing states, most statisticians I heard reporting were confident that Hillary wasn’t capable of winning them. The disparity is such that, even if some irregularities were found and the tally ended up being different after all of the hoopla, the original result would stand, and the whole thing would be a colossal waste of time.

So with the understanding of what I say above, I just chalked Jill Stein’s efforts up to political grandstanding. Since she got a small portion of the popular vote even when compared to other third party nominee, Gary Johnson, she was trying to keep herself and the Green Party relevant. At least until I read this article on Politico today.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-attorney-general-files-lawsuit-to-halt-recount-232114

In this, a Trump surrogate that filed a lawsuit against the Michigan Board of State Canvassers is quoted as saying “And she [Jill Stein] demanded a hand recount, a process that cannot possibly be completed in time for Michigan to guarantee that its votes will be counted in the Electoral College, and a process that will cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars.” What this is meant to imply is that they’re trying to stall the voting process to such a degree that the incomplete recount would make Michigan’s electoral votes ineligible to qualify when Electors around the country cast their votes on December 19 of this year.

Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the states in which recount efforts by Stein are underway, have a total of 46 Electoral votes to cast in the election on December 19. Since Donald Trump is projected to only have 306 Electoral votes if all of the states’ electors vote according to their constituents’ will, that would put him at only 260 total if these three states all fail to vote. While that’s still significantly more than the 232 that Hillary Clinton is projected to get, it’s still less than the 270 required to win the election.

The Federal Archives website states that “If no candidate receives a majority of Electoral votes, the House of Representatives elects the President from the 3 Presidential candidates who received the most Electoral votes. Each state delegation has one vote. The Senate would elect the Vice President from the 2 Vice Presidential candidates with the most Electoral votes. Each Senator would cast one vote for Vice President. If the House of Representatives fails to elect a President by Inauguration Day, the Vice-President Elect serves as acting President until the deadlock is resolved in the House.”

So my thoughts have changed on Jill Stein and her strategy. I think it’s possible that instead of either legitimately trying to root out fraud or simply just political grandstanding, she may be working with Hillary Clinton’s people to completely stop Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania from voting in the Electoral College at all. If successful, this will leave the door open for the House of Representatives, a group of people generally terrified of Donald Trump, to presumably elect Hillary Clinton under the reasoning that since she won the popular vote, she should get the nod. This would be quite the counter-coup if they could pull it off.

Other Sources: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/faq.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016