Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein defended her recount efforts Monday, even though she admits there is no evidence of fraud at the ballot box.
“What we have are predictors that if tampering took place, it would be most likely to be discovered in the three states where we are looking,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“Unless we actually look, we would never know,” she said.
Green Party officials filed for a recount in Wisconsin Friday after some limited reports of possible voting discrepancies in areas that used paper ballots versus those where electronic voting took place.
Stein has raised more than $5 million online for the recount in the state, which state officials estimate will cost about $3.5 million.
Stein’s campaign plans to request a recount in Michigan by Wednesday, and is working to organize the hundreds of petitions needed to get one started in Pennsylvania.
“But without having the evidence, aren’t you actually contributing, perhaps unfairly, to that lack of confidence in the system itself?” Cooper asked Stein.
“What the voting technology experts tell us is that you cannot tell unless you’re actually counting paper votes,” she said. “And I don’t think the FBI has done that.”
President-elect Donald Trump charged accused Stein of using this as a fundraising ploy by the Green Party and Stein — but she denied that she’s doing this for that reason.
“(The fundraised money) is all going into a dedicated recount fund that is not accessible to the campaign,” she said. “We don’t expect there to be money to leftover. If it turns out that there is, we will dispose of it using FEC guidelines.”