The recount effort by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in three US states came to an end on Monday, after weeks of legal wrangling yielded only one electoral review in Wisconsin that favoured Republican winner Donald Trump.
A federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected Stein’s request for a recount and an examination of that state's voting machines for evidence of hacking in the 8 November elections that Trump won.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin election officials said on Monday that they had completed their 10-day recount after finding that Trump's margin of victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton had increased by 131 votes, bringing Trump's total lead to 22,748.
Stein, who finished fourth, challenged the results in those two states as well as Michigan, where the state's top court on Friday denied Stein's last-ditch appeal to keep a recount going. All of those traditionally Democratic strongholds supported Trump over Clinton.
Even if all three recounts had taken place, they were unlikely to change the outcome.
Stein argued that the use in many Pennsylvania districts of electronic voting machines with no paper trail left the system vulnerable to hacking.
In a 31-page opinion, US District Judge Paul Diamond in Philadelphia said that to suspect that hacking occurred in Pennsylvania "borders on the irrational" . He noted that the deadline to certify the state's electoral votes is Tuesday, making it impossible to hold a recount in time.
While there is no evidence of large-scale voting machine hacking, US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia targeted Clinton in a series of cyber attacks. Trump has questioned those reports.
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In response to Diamond’s ruling, Stein said in a statement that Pennsylvanians’ right to have their votes counted had been “stripped from right under them.”
Trump won Pennsylvania by more than 44,000 votes and Michigan by more than 10,000 votes, according to the latest figures.
Despite winning the national popular vote by more than 2 percent, Clinton would have had to sweep those states to win the presidency under the US Electoral College system, which assigns electoral votes state-by-state rather than by overall national totals.
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