How many times does Hillary Clinton want to be told that she lost the 2016 presidential election to the guy she thought she should be beating in the polls by 50 points?
The latest variation on that theme came late Wednesday when the Michigan Court of Appeals shut down the state’s presidential recount, ruling that Green Party candidate Jill Stein has no legal standing to demand a recount, adding that no evidence of fraud had been found.
Even if the court had ruled that Stein had legal standing in her voter fraud argument, the result would not likely have changed the outcome of the election in Clinton’s favor. As LU noted yesterday via the Detroit News, more than a third of precincts in Wayne County, Michigan’s largest county and home to Detroit, stood to be disqualified from the recount because county officials, “couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts.” It is worth noting that Clinton took Wayne County, winning 95% of the votes.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
In his ruling, federal district court judge Mark Goldsmith, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote that Stein was not an “aggrieved candidate” under the law because she had no realisticc chance herself of winning the election. Stein received just 1% of the Michigan vote but argued her constitutional right to demand a recount as a means of exposing alleged flaws in the state’s electoral system. Neither argument was found to hold any water in the judge’s ruling.
In order for Clinton to upturn the outcome of the election, she needed to run the table in three states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Now that she has missed the trifecta, she and Stein need to go away.
