However, there may be other threshholds that are not just winning like the party gets to be considered a major party in Michigan if they get x% of the vote.
What principle? I mean the vote was pretty close, probably the only of the three Stein went after remotely likely to be changed by a recount. But it won’t change the end result and Michigan isn’t using some new fangled or opaque voting method.
Does voter support come from The Establishment or from voters? :dubious:
The Establishment can certainly discourage voters from selecting alternatives:
“It’s a wasted vote, my pretties.” — “*By voting for the one you prefer, wicked old R or D will get in ! Beware ! Beware ! *” — “No, only regular parties can help structure the voting system and gerrymander the districts.”
Seems to work.
About all a hand recount will catch will be cases where the little circle wasn’t completely obscured. (The optical equivalent of the hanging chad.)
As someone above posted, the law regarding recounts and who can request them may not allow Jill Stein to request a recount. She may not meet the definition of “aggrieved”. That’s up to the court to decide; certainly a cogent legal argument can be made that, given the disparity of votes between her and Donald Trump, she’s not aggrieved by any miscounting of votes that might have happened, in the absence of evidence of massive fraud.
The money aspect is mostly just to get Michigan voters all upset. But it also has a legal purpose. He will undoubtedly be trying to show that letting the recount continue to conclusion, THEN worrying about the legality of the effort (or the results) will cause massive expenses which won’t be covered by the fees that can be charged under the law. This gives the court incentive to act with immediacy. He’s also raising the issue of not meeting the “safe-harbor” deadline for that same reason, I suspect.
The question of whether or not she could win is not necessarily the crux of the biscuit. If she needs to get to a certain percentage of votes to qualify for any electoral standard, then, yeah, she is “aggrieved”. If she raises the money to pay for it and volunteers to do so, then why the hell not?
I am also wholly in favor of a nationwide conversation about how we vote, where, and so forth. That some of our citizens vote first-class and some others vote economy just ain’t right and could be fixed. Opposition to that generally comes from folks who are pretty content with The Way Things Are. Almost a matter of faith, really.
I do know that there is a minimum percentage that a candidate must get to maintain their party ballot line for the next election. What that standard is and if she got it or not are things I do not know.
Michigan distinguishes between “minor parties” and “major parties”. The qualifying threshold is 5% of the total vote.
There is another qualification - to be a minor party (as opposed to “independent candidate”). That threshold is 1%.
Stein got 1.1%. There is absolutely no way she’d get to 5% from the recount. So - no being “aggrieved” in any way other than the abstract.
I read Kennedy v. Board of Canvassers, 339 NW 2d 477 (Mich Ct App 1983) to lean towards saying that “aggrieved,” means someone who could have won but for the failures in proper counting:
The Court there is quoting with approval an earlier case.
That makes sense.
Which means that the Michigan Attorney General probably has a good case, since there’s no way Ms. Stein could have won but for any claimed failures in proper counting.
So the ultimate irony would be if after the recount Stein gets 0.9% of the vote.
Michigan appeals court rules on the AG’s argument:
*"The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the Board of State Canvassers never should have allowed a recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein to proceed, because she has no chance to overturn the result of the presidential election in her favor and is not an aggrieved candidate.
The panel ordered the board to “reject the Nov. 30, 2016 petition of candidate Stein that precipitated the current recount process.”
…
The state panel said that to qualify as “aggrieved,” Stein “must be able to allege a good faith belief that but for mistake or fraud,” she would have had a reasonable chance of winning."
Stein’s petition sent to the Board of State Canvassers “lacks even the most general allegations from which the board could infer that a recount would change the outcome of the election in Dr. Stein’s favor,” the panel said, given that she lost by more than 2.2 million votes.*
This is now bounced to federal court.
It’s not “bounced” to federal court. The matter in the Michigan state courts would be appealed, if at all, to the Michigan Supreme Court.
A separate legal effort in the federal courts is already underway. Indeed, Michigan was ordered by a federal judge to proceed with the recount prior to the cited Michigan Court of Appeals decision, and after that decision, the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected requests from Michigan officials to block the order of the federal judge. The result is that, at least in some counties, the recount is proceeding.
It is important from your cite to note that the Michigan courts at least seem to agree that the legal theory cited about “aggrieved party” by the Michigan Attorney General is valid. And I’m curious if the federal judge was ruling that the recount request was valid, and should proceed despite Michigan court orders, or was ruling that, IF it was valid, it had to be initiated without waiting the mandated two days (Michigan law). If the latter, then the Michigan court decisions may spell doom to the effort.
… and the Michigan recount is canceled.
Which pretty well answered my final question. 
And may I just point out that the opinion did cite Kennedy v. Board of Canvassers and adopted the reasoning I mention.
Sadly, my post here is uncredited in the opinion.
Don’t you just hate when people use your intellectual work and you don’t get the nod?