ON RECOUNTS AND FAKE NEWS

The Green Party's presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is raising an impressive sum to ask for a recount in three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The $4.6 million she's raised so far is more than a million dollars more than she raised during her entire presidential campaign.

The reasons she wants a recount are kind of unclear; Stein has appeared to suggest the election may have been "hack-friendly."

Don't expect any recount (if it happens) to change who our 45th president is. It is true if Hillary Clinton won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and all other results held — she would be our next president. (The electoral vote count would go from 306 Donald Trump-232 Clinton to 278 Clinton-260 Trump.)

WASHINGTON POST

By Amber Phillips

Happy Leftovers Day! As I write this, all is (relatively*) quiet in the political world. (* Relatively, given that we're still less than three weeks past one of the most epic political upsets in modern memory.) Let's run down the three biggest political news stories right now. 1. A last-ditch recount Green Patry presidential candidate Jill Stein speaks to pro-Bernie Sanders supporters outside City Hall in Philadelphia in July. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post) The Green Party's presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is raising an impressive sum to ask for a recount in three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The $4.6 million she's raised so far is more than a million dollars more than she raised during her entire presidential campaign. The reasons she wants a recount are kind of unclear; Stein has appeared to suggest the election may have been "hack-friendly." Don't expect any recount (if it happens) to change who our 45th president is. It is true if Hillary Clinton won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and all other results held — she would be our next president. (The electoral vote count would go from 306 Donald Trump-232 Clinton to 278 Clinton-260 Trump.) But there's no guarantee more votes for Clinton is what these recounts would find, because there's no evidence the votes were counted wrong in the first place. As Philip Bump and I explained earlier this year, it's virtually impossible to hack our actual voting system, and that seems to be what Stein is suggesting happened. It's safe to conclude the support for a Green Party recount effort is less a reflection of support for the Green Party and more a reflection of something much broader — dissatisfaction with who actually won the presidential election. But not even a buzzy recount is likely to change those results. More disturbing news about fake news. The Post's Craig Timberg reports that the flood of fake news got a boost during the campaign from Russia. Specifically, a Russian propaganda arm created and spread misleading articles online to make Clinton look bad, make Trump look good and generally undermine faith in our democracy. Timberg: Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia. How widespread was this? An independent research investigation on fake news estimates these Russian-promoted articles were seen on social media more than 213 million times throughout the campaign. (For reference, in The Washington Post's record-breaking October, nearly 100 million visitors came to our site.) WASHINGTON POST