Donald Trump's campaign fights to stop Jill Stein's Michigan vote recount

Donald Trump has launched a legal battle to try and prevent a recount of votes in Michigan – a state he won by a razor-thin margin of barely 10,000 votes.

Green Party leader Jill Stein, with the backing of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has filed suits to order state officials in Michigan, Wisconsin and Michigan to carry out a hand recount of ballots. Mr Trump has condemned the proposal in the strongest terms.

Michigan’s elections board will on Friday consider President-elect Trump’s request to block a hand recount of all 4.8m ballots cast in the state he won by about 10,700 votes over Ms Clinton.

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The Associated Press that on Thursday, lawyers for the Trump campaign argued that Ms Stein, who he had described as a “bottom-dwelling candidate”, could not seek the expensive, time-consuming recount because she was not “aggrieved” to the point where potential miscounting of votes could have cost her the election. She won just one per cent in Michigan.

They also said in their objection that Ms Stein waited until the last minute to file her recount petition on Wednesday, making it impossible to finish by a 13 December deadline.

Ms Stein said in response that Mr Trump’s “cynical efforts to delay the recount and create unnecessary costs for taxpayers are shameful and outrageous”. His objections suspended the planned Friday start of the recount until next week.

A recount is already underway in Wisconsin, which Mr Trump won by roughly 22,000 votes and where the first reporting of numbers was expected Friday. In Pennsylvania, a hearing was scheduled for next Monday on Ms Stein’s effort to secure a statewide recount, a legal maneuver that has never been tried, according to one of the attorneys who filed it.

Ms Stein is among those who have said they do not believe the the recounts were likely to change enough votes to change the outcome in any of the states.

As a result of such an admission the the Wisconsin recount does not carry nearly the same drama as the Florida recount in 2000, when the outcome of the presidential race between Al Gore and George W Bush hung in the balance.

“This is certainly not Bush v Gore,” said Mike Haas, Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator.

Even so, the campaigns for Mr Trump, Ms Clinton and Ms Stein all had observers spread throughout the state to watch the process, the AP said.

The recount will have to move quickly. The federal deadline to certify the vote to avoid having the fate of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes decided by Congress is 13 December. Even if that were to happen, the votes would almost certainly go to Mr Trump, since Republicans control both chambers of Congress.

Ms Stein has argued, without evidence, that irregularities in the votes in all three states suggest that there could have been tampering with the vote, perhaps through a well-coordinated, highly complex cyberattack.

“Verifying the vote through this recount is the only way to confirm that every vote has been counted securely and accurately and is not compromised by machine or human error, or by tampering or hacking,” she said.