By Philip Hodges and Jeff Dunetz

The big Philadelphia presidential election hand recount is over. The Green Party’s Jill Stein who demanded the re-count and Hillary Clinton’s whose campaign said we’ll play recount with the greenies, might just be on to something with this fraud claim. You see, they finished the recount in Philadelphia, and Hillary narrowed the gap between herself and Trump; by five whole votes. But I am sure they were important votes (apparently the Green Party’s recount committee is not happy).

The good news is it wasn’t the Russians hacking into voting machines that caused the difference. Since they weren’t connect to the internet that wasn’t a possibility despite what the liberals say (unless the machines were visited by the voting machine fairy).

Pennsylvania uses fairly antiquated electronic voting machines. They were manufactured some time in the 80’s. The downside to them – as with most electronic voting systems – is that there’s no paper trail to verify whether votes were counted correctly.

But then again, the major Hillary Clinton recount bump of five votes didn’t come from the antiquated voting machines. They were from absentee and early voting paper ballots. Apparently the scanner didn’t pick up five votes for Hillary.

As Billy Penn reported:

The great Philadelphia recount has ended, and Hillary Clinton got five more votes than she had in her previous total.

 

Donald Trump’s number stayed the same, as did the totals for Independent candidate Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein after the City Commissioners Office recounted votes in 75 of Philadelphia’s more than 1600 voting divisions. The recount had been launched by 250-plus Philadelphia residents answering the call of Stein, who asked for three petitioners in each of Pennsylvania’s voting district to file recounts to assist in her attempts to get a statewide recount through a Commonwealth Court and then Federal Court lawsuit.

 

The five extra votes for Clinton, he said, came from paper provisional or absentee ballots that were undetected by the optical scanner that counted votes in the days following the election. Schmidt said this can happen when people don’t mark their choices clearly on paper ballots or, ridiculous as it sounds, use a green highlighter instead of a pen or pencil.

 

“People do ridiculous things,” he said, “all the time.”

 

The markings that went undetected by the optical scanner were picked up by the manual recount.

Five whole votes…or as President Gerald Ford famously said, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

The Iowa caucuses are only three years, three months away.  So can we stop with this recount nonsense yet? Besides, I understand the Green Party’s recount decision team regrets that they started the whole mess.

Parts of this post were originally seen at Eagle Rising