I was initially on the lookout for old quotes from the left about supporting recounts and figured going to the source would be a good place to start. Right at the top of Jill Stein’s Twitter page was this and there has been zero press on it. We all can guess why.
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From back in 2016 (and I have bolded the important stuff):
BIG WIN FOR ELECTION INTEGRITY: the Stein 2016 #Recount campaign has won our court fight in Wisconsin, overcoming the final obstacle to a groundbreaking examination of voting machine source code by defeating voting machine vendors’ attempts to gag us from telling the public what we find.
Statement from the Stein Recount Campaign
October 30, 2020
Contact: Stein2016Recount@gmail.comStein Recount announces major legal win in Wisconsin, will proceed with groundbreaking examination of critical voting machine software
Former Green Party Presidential nominee Jill Stein announced today a major victory for election integrity in litigation arising from the Stein 2016 presidential recount. She celebrated the final defeat in Wisconsin’s courts of voting machine vendor’s attempts to impose a gag rule on the Stein 2016 recount, which clears the way for Stein’s designated expert J. Alex Halderman to finally inspect the code that runs many voting machines used in Wisconsin and across the U.S., and disclose conclusions about the software’s reliability and accuracy to the public.
“This is a major win for voters everywhere,” Stein noted. “The courts have affirmed that the largest manufacturer of voting machines in the US, Election Systems & Software, has no right to suppress the findings of our upcoming inspection of key election software. That inspection will bring much needed transparency and accountability to the software that counts our votes. This win affirms that corporations cannot shield the voting software we rely on from public scrutiny.”
“With election integrity finally getting some much-needed attention, this is a huge victory for the public’s right to elections we can trust, that are accurate, secure, and just,” said Stein.
While celebrating the legal win, Stein bemoaned the voting machine vendors’ efforts to tie the case up in court for almost four years, preventing the Stein recount campaign from examining the voting machines before the 2020 election. “It’s outrageous that voting machine vendors that profit from government contracts have been able to use those profits to buy political influence and prevent scrutiny of their machines through legal machinations,” said Stein.
Wisconsin law allows campaigns that file for recounts the right to inspect voting machine “source code” – the software that controls the actual counting and tallying of the votes in systems used across the country. Stein is currently involved in discussions to plan the examination with the expert designated to conduct it, Dr. J. Alex Halderman, professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and a leading expert in cybersecurity and election technology. “This is a unique opportunity for independent scrutiny,” said Halderman. “The examination will give the public and officials a more complete picture of election security risks and ultimately help make voting more secure.”
This victory in Wisconsin is the latest in a series of wins for election integrity by the Stein 2016 recount and subsequent litigation. In 2018, Stein settled her recount lawsuit with the state of Pennsylvania for a guarantee that the state would replace all paperless voting machines with systems using voter-verifiable paper ballots by 2020, and in 2022 would introduce post-election risk-limiting audits to verify the vote before results are certified. Stein took Pennsylvania back to court to demand decertification of the flawed ES&S Expressvote XL ballot-marking devices, and while the court ultimately ruled against decertification, the lawsuit played a role in dissuading several counties from purchasing the machines. Stein’s recount litigation in Pennsylvania struck a critical blow against the use of paperless Direct Recording Electronic voting machines, and brought up-to-date election integrity practices to a state that had been among the worst in the nation.
The 2016 recount in Wisconsin, while it did not include a full hand recount of all counties that would be needed to truly verify the result, did bring unprecedented transparency to the state’s vote-counting process and led directly to the state’s decertification of Optech Eagle voting machines that were observed miscounting ballots during the recount in Racine County. The recount produced a mountain of data, which was analyzed by academics from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Wisconsin, and put to use by election integrity advocates and the Wisconsin Elections Commission to improve practices that had led to 1 out of every 170 votes originally being miscounted.
The recount effort in Michigan, which was quickly halted by a Republican-appointed judge’s ruling that Stein lacked standing to compel a recount, exposed glaring problems with Michigan’s elections, including an improbable 84,000 undervotes in the presidential race, faulty machines concentrated in urban precincts that broke down in large numbers, and a provision in state law preventing the recounting of precincts where problems arose. In Detroit, more than 80 ballot scanners broke down on election day in 2016, and a whopping 60% of precincts were ruled ineligible for recounting due to problems with the initial count. While the recount was quickly halted, the national attention on Michigan’s failings galvanized the state to replace many of its faulty voting machines shortly after the 2016 election.
“This is a huge win for voters everywhere who want elections we can trust,” said Stein. “Thanks and congratulations are due to our dedicated legal team, particularly Debbie Greenberger and Chris Meuler in Wisconsin’s litigation as well as Ilann Maazel in Pennsylvania’s, and the thousands of people who supported the recount as donors and volunteers. This win for democracy belongs to all of us.
So…what does this mean? Wisconsin has been using mostly Dominion voting machines, and the Stein lawsuit should give access to the 2016 version of the code.
Now I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that if Jill Stein can get access, Trump’s lawyers should be able to as well and not have to wait four years to do it. The precedent is there. Jill Stein is no fan of Donald Trump. Her original lawsuit was intended to overturn the 2016 election. If this turns out right this may be the key to showing us the inner workings of the Dominion voting machine fraud.
I was looking for quotes of people supporting her 2016 recount, so I started in the obvious place..her twitter page. and that was right at the top. Now, I’m no lawyer, but if she got the source code for the voting machines, wouldn’t that set a precedent for Trump to get the same thing in Wisonsin? Using that, it should be easy to prove that votes were weighted one way or the other.
I don’t see anyone talking about this, and honestly I think it’s been just plain missed…
