2016 Election Recount Ends: Michigan, Wisconsin And Pennsylvania Finalize Results For Trump As Clinton Extends Popular Vote Lead

The election recount effort in three crucial states that critics claimed was doomed from the start came to an end Monday. Just one state, Wisconsin, actually conducted a recount, with Donald Trump ending up improving his lead there by a modest number of votes. The president-elect soon tweeted away about the results.

“Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have just certified my wins in those states,” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday night. “I actually picked up additional votes!”

Federal judges in both Pennsylvania and Michigan rejected the efforts led by former presidential candidate Jill Stein to recount their votes, citing a lack of standing from Stein. The Green Party candidate, they reasoned, was not personally injured by the election results and no reevaluation of the ballots could conceivably lead to her winning either state.

Trump wound up with 131 more votes in Wisconsin than he had before the recount. Recounts in the other two states would likely neither have changed the outcome of the election nor the results in those states. Democrat Hillary Clinton, who beat Trump in the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes but came up short in the Electoral College, trailed by a significant enough number of votes in those states. Clinton’s popular vote tally is one of the largest in American history for a presidential candidate who ended up losing the general election.

Clinton’s losses in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were devastating for her candidacy. The three states have traditionally been Democratic strongholds and made up an important part of the former secretary of state's so-called “firewall” to keep Trump from reaching a majority of Electoral College votes. The breakdown of that firewall has been blamed in part by Clinton and the Democratic Party’s inability to attract working class voters there who felt left behind in the modern American economy.