President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies have filed separate legal challenges in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a suddenly robust effort to stop the presidential election recount efforts there.
None of the challenges immediately derailed the recounts in those states, but they promised to complicate them with more legal wrangling by Mr. Trump, groups supportive of him, state officials and Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate. Ms. Stein initiated the recounts and a successful fund-raising drive after suggesting that voting machines were susceptible to hacking.
On Friday, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in the Michigan Court of Appeals in an attempt to block the recount there, which had not yet begun. “If the Bureau of Elections moves forward with the recount, it will waste the State’s scarce resources, create a logistical nightmare for counties across the State, and assure that Michigan’s Electoral College voters will not be counted,” the filing said.
Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general, filed a separate lawsuit in a bid to halt the recount, saying that it put the state’s voters at risk of “paying millions and potentially losing their voice in the Electoral College in the process.”
In his court filing, Mr. Schuette, a Republican who is widely mentioned as a possible candidate for governor in 2018, said, “This court cannot allow a dilatory and frivolous request for a recount by an aggrieved party to silence all Michigan votes for president.’’
In Wisconsin, a lawsuit against the state Elections Commission was filed Thursday in Federal District Court by the Great America PAC, the Stop Hillary PAC and Ronald R. Johnson, a Wisconsin resident. The lawsuit said that the recount could “unjustifiably cast doubt” on Mr. Trump’s victory in that state.
The plaintiffs argued that the recount, which began across the state’s 72 counties on Thursday morning, should be halted immediately, in part because there was a substantial chance that it cannot be accurately completed by mid-December. Results must be certified before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 19. In 2011, a statewide recount took close to a month.
A federal judge said Friday that he would not halt the recount, but allowed the lawsuit to proceed.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and his allies are also seeking to halt legal proceedings by Ms. Stein to contest the statewide election results in Pennsylvania.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has participated only lightly, paying for lawyers to be present at recount sites. Still, the recounts have generated excitement among some of her supporters, hoping that the small margins in the three traditionally Democratic states might swing to Mrs. Clinton in a recount.
But Edward B. Foley, director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, said there was no comparison between this recount and the 2000 Florida impasse between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Then, he said, “it was quite plausible that Gore might prevail in a recount.’’
The chance that these state recounts could reverse the outcome of the 2016 election, Mr. Foley said, was “essentially zero or infinitesimal.”
Ms. Stein, in a statement, said the challenges to the recounts were an effort to put “party politics above country.”
This article originally appeared on The New York Times.
