Activists urged former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to challenge the results of the 2016 election after they said they found irregularities in the results of three states.
“The group of election lawyers and computer scientists says Clinton, the Democratic nominee, should call for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” said a report in the Hill two weeks after Election Day 2016. “They claim election results in those states could have been manipulated or hacked.”
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The group of lawyers and computer scientists, which was led by voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and Director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Computer Security and Society J. Alex Halderman, said that Clinton received 7% fewer votes in Wisconsin counties that used electronic voting machines instead of optical scanners or paper ballots.
The group claimed that Clinton could have missed out on as many as 30,000 votes, which could have tipped the election in her favor after President Trump won the state by 27,000 votes. They called on Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to discuss their findings with them.
The activists said the irregularities should be looked into, although they admitted that the numbers themselves were not proof of hacking.
A similar storyline is playing out after the 2020 Election, with Trump’s legal team claiming that a software company responsible for tallying votes could be responsible for irregularities that tipped the election in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump lawyers Sidney Powell has claimed that Dominion Voting Systems’ software, used widely across battleground states in the 2020 election, was designed to “rig elections.”
“The math just doesn’t add up for anything, and we know Dominion has a long history of rigging elections because that’s what it was created to do to begin with,” Powell said.
“The Dominion Voting Systems, the Smartmatic technology software … were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out,” Powell said in a press conference Thursday. “We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood and the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. … As soon as he saw multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here.”
Much like before the 2016 election, experts have said that changing an election outcome with widespread fraud is nearly impossible in the United States, with counting done by both Republicans and Democrats across the country in a decentralized system, acting as a barrier to fraud.
Trump has yet to concede the 2020 election to Biden, opting to let the legal process play out.
