HARRISBURG, Pa. — Green Party-backed voters dropped a court case Saturday night that had sought to force a statewide recount of Pennsylvania’s Nov. 8 presidential election, won by Republican Donald Trump, in what Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein had framed as an effort to explore whether voting machines and systems had been hacked and the election result manipulated.
But later Saturday night, the party announced it’ll go to federal court instead. A statement from the lead lawyer for the recount campaign says it’ll seek an emergency federal court order for the recount. It says barriers to a recount in Pennsylvania are pervasive and the state court system isn’t equipped to address them.
The decision on the state case came two days before a court hearing was scheduled. Saturday’s court filing to withdraw the case said the Green Party-backed voters who filed the case “are regular citizens of ordinary means” and cannot afford the $1 million bond ordered by the court by 5 p.m. Monday. Green Party-backed efforts to force recounts and analyze election software in some precincts were continuing.
Ms. Stein had planned to make an announcement about the Pennsylvania recount Monday outside the Trump Tower in New York.
Late Saturday night, Jonathan Abady, lead counsel to the Stein recount efforts, said, “on Monday the Stein campaign will escalate our campaign in Pennsylvania and file for emergency relief in federal court, demanding a statewide recount on constitutional grounds.”
The state court case had been part of an effort spearheaded by Ms. Stein to force recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, three states with a history of backing Democrats for president that were narrowly and unexpectedly won by Mr. Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
A recount began Thursday in Wisconsin, while a recount could begin next week in Michigan. Mr. Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania was particularly stunning: the state’s fifth-most electoral votes are a key stepping stone to the White House, and no Republican presidential candidate had captured the state since 1988.
Ms. Stein had said the purpose of Pennsylvania’s recount was to ensure “our votes are safe and secure,” considering hackers’ probing of election targets in other states and hackers’ accessing of the emails of the Democratic National Committee and several Clinton staffers. U.S. security officials have said they believe Russian hackers orchestrated the hacks, something Russia has denied.
Ms. Stein’s lawyers, however, had offered no evidence of hacking in Pennsylvania’s election. They sought unsuccessfully in recent days to get various counties to allow a forensic examination of their election system software.
While the Stein campaign cited the difficulty of raising the required bond money, its effort faced other challenges. In a Dec. 2 order, the campaign was told it would have to address concerns about the filing at a Monday hearing. Among the hurdles: whether the court could hear the case without affidavits from at least five voters specifically saying “the election was undue or illegal” and that the petition to contest it was “made in good faith.” In 1925, the state Supreme Court ruled that unless affidavits explicitly made those allegations — even if they were contained in the underlying complaint — the effort to contest the results was fatally flawed.
A call to Lawrence Otter, the attorney representing the Stein effort, was not returned Saturday night.
The withdrawal of the Commonwealth Court case will not have an immediate effect on county-level efforts to check vote totals in individual precincts. Allegheny County is scheduled to conduct such a check in 52 precincts on Monday.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump and the state Republican Party argued there was no evidence, or even an allegation, that tampering with Pennsylvania’s voting systems had occurred. Further, Pennsylvania law does not allow a court-ordered recount, they argued, and a lawyer for the Green Party had acknowledged that the effort was without precedent in Pennsylvania.
The case also had threatened Pennsylvania’s ability to certify its presidential electors by the Dec. 13 federal deadline, Republican lawyers argued.
On Saturday, a GOP lawyer, Lawrence Tabas, said the case had been meant “solely for purposes to delay the Electoral College vote in Pennsylvania for President-Elect Trump.”
The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, a Democrat, has said there was no evidence of any sort of cyberattacks or irregularities in the election. Any recount would change few votes, Mr. Cortes predicted.
As of Friday, Mr. Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 49,000, or less than 1 percent, out of 6 million votes cast, according to state election officials. Final counts were outstanding in some counties, including heavily populated Allegheny County, but state and county officials did not expect any outstanding uncounted votes to change the outcome of the presidential election.
Pennsylvania’s automatic statewide recount trigger is 0.5 percent. Ms. Stein drew less than 1 percent of the votes cast.
Still, Pennsylvania is viewed as perhaps the nation’s biggest target to hack: It’s a swing state with a large number of electoral votes crucial to winning the White House and its election systems are seen as relatively vulnerable.
A forensic audit of election software is more important in Pennsylvania than in many other states, say nonpartisan election watchdogs, because the vast majority of voters cast ballots on a machine that does not show them a paper receipt, independent of the machine software, to verify that the machine faithfully recorded their votes.
Post-Gazette staff writer Chris Potter contributed to this report.
First Published: December 3, 2016, 11:21 p.m.