WASHINGTON (AP) — Wisconsin election officials are expected to meet Monday to discuss a possible timeline for a recount of the state’s presidential election.
The recount comes at the request of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who says it’s important to determine whether hacking may have affected the results. Stein says she also plans to request recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
President-elect Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and has a small lead in Michigan.
There’s no evidence voter results were hacked or electronic voting machines were compromised.
While Hillary Clinton’s campaign formally joined Stein’s Wisconsin recount effort on Saturday, a lawyer for the Democratic campaign has said there is “no actionable evidence” of an altered outcome.
Wisconsin officials say it will be tough to finish the recount by the federally required deadline of Dec. 13.
Trump’s incoming chief of staff suggests Clinton is backing away from a deal worked out between the two presidential campaigns on how the loser would concede to the winner.
Reince Priebus told “Fox News Sunday” that Clinton’s team “cut a deal” with Trump’s team specifying that once The Associated Press called the race in favor of one candidate, the other would call within 15 minutes to concede.
Priebus says that’s just what happened election night.
But now he’s questioning whether Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias is backing down from that deal by announcing Clinton will participate in a recount in Wisconsin and may do the same in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
AP’s director of media relations, Lauren Easton, says AP “calls races when it is clear that one candidate has prevailed over the other. We have no knowledge of what the candidates do with that information until there is a public claim of victory or a concession.”
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway is calling Clinton’s decision to join a recount effort “incredible” and noting that the president-elect has not ruled out pursuing a criminal investigation into his former Democratic rival.
Conway told CNN’s “State of the Nation” that Trump has not ruled out a criminal probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, even though Trump recently indicated he’d rather not do so.
She said, “He’s been incredibly gracious and magnanimous to Secretary Clinton at a time when, for whatever reason, her folks are saying they will join in a recount to try to somehow undo the 70-plus electoral votes that he beat her by.”
Conway added, “The idea that we are going to drag this out now where the president-elect has been incredibly magnanimous to the Clintons and to the Obamas is pretty incredible.”
Trump took to Twitter Sunday morning to condemn the Green Party-backed recount effort as “a scam.”
