After spending the entire election railing against Hillary Clinton and siphoning votes from her, Green party candidate responded to Donald Trump’s victory by demanding a recount—but only in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, three states Trump narrowly won where reversing the results would swing the election for Clinton. (The last two polls in Minnesota predicted a Clinton victory of 8 and 11 points respectively, but oddly, no one was interested in probing possible vote irregularities there since she still won the state by just over a point.)
Nonetheless, Stein and the Green party quickly raised over $7 million to fund the recount, which was an abysmal failure. Trump gained votes in the Wisconsin recount, and federal judges shut down the recount attempts in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Though the aborted recount in Michigan did suspiciously expose that 37 percent of precincts in Detroit “tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books.”
Already, many people suspected that the recount attempt was merely a way for Stein and the Green party to line their pockets, and now the Washington Free Beacon reports that more than a few people made good money off of the doomed recount:
The Beacon further notes that the recount effort raised twice as much money as Stein’s presidential campaign.
