(No caption)
Update: Saturday, 7 p.m. -- Green Party candidate Jill Stein conceded today that the recount is over, the Detroit News reports. She said she would not take any further legal action.
_______________________
From Earlier Today
Those who insisted the presidential recount in Michigan was a waste of money can rejoice. It appears to be over. For those who wanted to make sure everything was on the up and up, well sorry. The top court in the state has spoken.
The Michigan Supreme Court on Friday denied Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s appeal to restart a partially completed presidential election recount, reports Jonathan Oosting in The Detroit News. Stein could turn to the U.S. Court of Appeals for a final, desperate attempt to revive the recount, but it's not likely.
The state will save money by ending the recount. But in a year in which the CIA has concluded that the Russians intervened in the presidential race to help Donald Trump, justice may have been better served by letting the recount go forward so authorities could confirm that everything was on the up and up.
Nonsense, some might say. There's no evidence of sabotage, that anything was amiss. And yes, in all likelihood, nothing was amiss. Then again, in Detroit, the election may have been sabotaged as a result of incompetence by the city clerk, poorly trained precinct workers and broken machines. That may have cost Hillary Clinton plenty votes, and that in itself made the recount worthy of undertaking.
And then there was this reason for a recount: President-elect Trump insisted he was robbed of the popular vote in America because millions of people voted illegally. He's the president-elect. Why would he make that up?
Shamefully, the state Supreme Court's 3-2 vote came down to partisan politics.
Republican-nominated justices Stephen Markman, Brian Zahra and David Viviano denied the appeal. Zahra and Viviano wrote a concurring opinion that further explained why the Court of Appeals was correct to rule that Stein is not an “aggrieved” candidate who could request an appeal, the News wrote. She finished a distant fourth behind Trump and Clinton.
“Thus, petitioner failed to allege that she has been harmed or that her legal rights have been infringed in any way whatsoever,” the court's majority wrote. In other words, they said Stein had no standing because she couldn't possibly have won the race in Michigan after the recount.
Stein's attorney, former state Democratic Party chair Mark Brewer, tells The News:
“I think they’re wrong, and they just made up a new standard of law solely for the purpose of this case."
Justice Richard Bernstein
Democrat-nominated Justice Richard Bernstein dissented, saying the Court of Appeals had erred.
“Even a candidate who is unlikely to win an election has significant legal and financial interest in ensuring the total vote count is accurate and may be aggrieved by any error in the canvass of the votes,” Bernstein writes. “Had the Legislature intended to only allow the most popular candidates to request a recount, it could have easily made that clear in the statute.”
As a result, we'll never know for sure whether anyone tampered with the election in Michigan.
Instead, we'll have to rely on the words of Donald Trump, who repeatedly said the election is rigged and that millions of people voted illegally.
Comforting statements.
