Jill Stein withdraws petition for vote recount in Pennsylvania

Green Party candidate Jill Stein has ended her state-wide ballot recount efforts in Pennsylvania. However, her team has decided to continue the fight.

According to reports, Lawrence M. Otter, a lawyer for the former Green Party presidential candidate, withdrew the lawsuit filed with the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania yesterday with the filing saying, "Petitioners are regular citizens of ordinary means. They cannot afford to post the USD 1,000,000 bond required by the Court.

Accordingly, kindly mark the above captioned matter withdrawn and discontinued."

In a series of tweets yesterday, Stein said, "#Recount2016 is so expensive because of elected leaders who have refused to invest in a 21st-century voting system."

She questioned, "How odd is it that we must jump through bureaucratic hoops and raise millions of dollars so we can trust our election results?"

"The Stein campaign will fight for a statewide recount in PA. We are committed to protecting the civil and voting rights of all Americans," she said in another tweet.

The Green party candidate had last month requested recounts in the three states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan where Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton.

Stein made the request after a coalition of election security experts was concerned that the electoral process could have been disrupted by foreign hackers.

Stein and her allies have suggested that hackers may have downloaded state voter registration databases and filed bogus absentee ballots or tampered in some way with the electronic machines that register votes but they have not offered proof pointing to either theory.