Jill Stein has led efforts to conduct a recount in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, over certain noticed anomalies in the percentage of votes. There is a reasonable concern that the integrity of the voting and/or tabulation process may have been compromised. That doesn't mean that it was compromised, but it's possible, and Stein felt that it should be investigated. This feeling has been shared by several cyber-security experts, and she's had no problem raising money to fund the filing and attorney fees.
One notable treatise about this was published by Dr. J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan. You can read about it here. If you at least skim the article, you'll understand much of what I'm going to type.
https://medium.com/@jhalderm/want-to-know-if-the-election-was-hacked-look-at-the-ballots-c61a6113b0ba#.t8x7hmg3m
If no evidence of vote tampering is found, then all is well, and Trump should be inaugurated on January 20th. The time and money spent will be justified by providing peace of mind to the American people that the voting process was fair and honest (which can't be said about other elections, notably in 2000 and 1960).
My belief is that there was vote fraud not only in those three states but also in several other "battleground" states. I believe this because polls are seldom as wrong as the polls apparently were this time. Polls today are much more sophisticated and accurate than they were even a decade ago. They seldom miss by as much as they seemed to this time in as many states as they seemed to this time. There is simply no way that polls conducted on the day before the election AND exit polls conducted on the day of the election could have ALL been as far off as it turned out. Trump won states that he was supposed to lose, won states that he was ahead in by more than was predicted, and lost a couple of states that he was supposed to lose by less than predicted. And yet --- here is the part that makes no sense:
States that Trump was supposed to win easily, and states that Clinton was supposed to win easily fell almost exactly to the percentages that the polls predicted. Yet Trump outperformed the polls in every state that was considered to be a "tossup."
Read the bold type again. How is it that the states that were solid red and solid blue by wide margins all performed exactly as they were supposed to --- but Trump outperformed expectations in all the battleground states?
If recounts and forensic analysis shows that there was indeed tampering in those three states, then these things need to happen:
1) There needs to be an investigation to determine (if possible) who was responsible for the tampering, and who knew about it in advance.
2) The entire Presidential election results --- for ALL STATES and the District of Columbia --- need to be tossed out, and a new election needs to take place: one entirely with paper ballots that are monitored (both at the polling places and during tabulation) by representatives of any participating candidate who is interested in such monitoring. All participating candidates from the general election should be included again for states in which they qualified for the ballot. Yes, that will be expensive, but we're dealing with the election for the President of the United States. It needs to be done.
3) Security needs to be upgraded so that this won't ever happen again.
In 1960, Richard Nixon asked his party to not contest his election loss against Kennedy. Nixon was not stupid: he knew or strongly suspected that there was ballot box stuffing in both Illinois and Texas, and winning both states would have given him the election. Nixon was concerned that contesting the election would deeply divide the country, and he was probably correct.
IT'S GOING TO GET UGLY, REGARDLESS
There's no such concern today. The country is deeply divided as it is, and third-parties (in this case Stein) can contest it, provided they have the money to do so where fees are warranted. This is going to further divide the country, and it will get much worse if tampering is discovered and worse yet if the election results are changed or voided.
If the Supreme Court (where it would ultimately go) does uphold the voiding of the election, and it's held again, how many fewer votes would Donald Trump get, now that those who voted for him have seen him renege or hedge on 6 to 10 (depending on what you consider to be reneging and hedging) of his campaign promises? If the election is held again, by manually-counted paper ballots, it's virtually certain that Clinton will win.
If the three states swing to Clinton and give her the election, things will get uglier than can be imagined.
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