Washington: US President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday on Twitter that “nothing will change” as a result of the campaign to recount the votes cast in three states in the November 8 presidential election.
The recount campaign is being headed by the Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein, EFE news reported.
In a series of tweets, Trump said that his main rival for the White House, Democratic Hillary Clinton, “conceded the election when she called me just prior to (my) victory speech and after the results were in”.
In addition, the next day, Clinton telephoned Trump to say that “we have to accept the results and look to the future”, he said, paraphrasing what she had said in one of the presidential debates.
“So much time and money will be spent — same result! Sad,” the President-elect went on to say, via Twitter.
Stein’s campaign last Wednesday launched a fundraising effort to finance vote recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all of which Trump apparently won by narrow margins.
Wisconsin announced on Friday that it will conduct a vote recount in response to the formal request presented by Stein and another independent presidential candidate Rocky De La Fuente.
According to the Green candidate’s campaign, there is “compelling evidence of anomalies” in voting in the three states in question and, therefore, it is necessary to verify the results in those states’ counties that depend on electronic voting machines to tally the ballots.
Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, is backing the decision by Wisconsin authorities to conduct the recount despite saying that no irregularities have been detected in the election, and it said that it will also support recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan if the Green Party, as expected, formally requests them, EFE news added.
On Saturday, Trump issued a statement in which he called the Green Party’s effort a “scam”.
“The people have spoken and the election is over,” Trump said. “We must accept this result and then look to the future. This recount is just a way for Jill Stein to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount.”
Despite the fact that Trump garnered more than 270 electoral votes, which technically is all that is required to win the presidency, Clinton received more than two million more votes than the real-estate mogul in the nationwide popular vote, according to the Cook Political Report Web page.
During the campaign, Trump was the one who had warned numerous times of possible election fraud and denounced the electoral system as being “rigged” against him, going so far as to threaten not to recognise the results of the election if he lost.
–IANS