Green Party candidate Jill Stein raises over $5M; files request for election recount in Wisconsin

WASHINGTON (AP) - Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has filed a request for a recount with Wisconsin election officials.

State Elections Commission Administrator Mike Haas said Stein filed the request around mid-afternoon Friday, about an hour and a half ahead of a 5 p.m. CST deadline.

Stein's campaign has been raising money online to cover the costs of recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She says she wants to make sure hackers didn't skew the results in those swing states. The campaign had raised about $5.2 million as of Friday afternoon. On Stein's website she announced she has enough money to to fund a Pennsylvania recount. 

Wisconsin law calls for the state to perform a recount at a candidate's request as long as he or she can pay for it. The state has never performed a presidential recount. Election officials estimate the effort will cost up to $1 million.

"We're doing this to ensure the integrity of our system," he said.

Trump's team ignored questions about the looming recounts. Set to assume the presidency in 55 days, he was focused instead on the daunting task of building an administration from scratch.

"People are going through the various stages of grievance and denial of acceptance of the reality of Donald Trump being elected President of the United States of America," said James Taylor a professor of politics at University of San Francisco. 

Stein said on a Facebook Live on Friday that the results in the swing states were extremely close and unexpected. "This is what the experts tell us we would see if the system was hacked into," Stein said. 

"What we're saying is that there's enough peripheral evidence to warrant that our system should be investigated," concluded George Martin, former co-chair of the Wisconsin Green Party.