Why would anyone put so much time and money into an activity they hope to lose?

I think the whole issue was created to make him look bad. "Hey, if you lose, will you accept the results?" After Gore/Bush, I don't know if anybody would immediately say "Yes" without thinking about the possibility of questionable things happening. Would you accept the results of an election with fraud? Until the election happens, you can't have 100% confidence that you won't think there was some fraud.

A lot of us here have questions about voting machines, people voting who shouldn't, etc. These are natural concerns that should be Hillary's concerns (as they are now) and not just Trump's.

The question was not "Assuming there is iron clad proof of no voter fraud, will you accept the results if you lose?" The answer would almost certainly have been "Yes" in that case. I think all of us on this site are smart enough to assign non-zero probability to the chance that this question was asked WITHOUT the "no voter fraud" disclaimer specifically to elicit the reaction that it got.

"I think the whole issue was created to make him look bad."

...He created the issue.

He spent weeks/months claiming the system was rigged, the election would be rigged, that the only way he could possibly lose was if he was cheated because he was going to win by such a landslide. He kept calling for people to loiter around polling sites with guns to prevent funny business...

That wasn't post-2000 reticence about the preliminary call.

> money

He loaned $45 million and gave less than $10 million, but mostly as in-kind gifts not cash. He said back in 2000 he could run for president and make money from the campaign. I think he succeeded, depending on the interest rate of that loan. He spent a bunch of campaign funds by buying from his own businesses.

> time and money

Maybe he just wanted to be on TV.

> He spent a bunch of campaign funds by buying from his own businesses.

Is that illegal?

No, just lame.

> A lot of us here have questions about voting machines, people voting who shouldn't, etc.

I thought only Republicans keep continuing the fairy tale of non-citizens voting, which they then use to justify voter suppression of poor people and minorities; which is the actual question this election.

> Recount is different from rejection

Recount is also different then acceptance.

This recount is purely academic. You would have to alter tens of thousands of votes across several states to change this election's outcome. No harm in being academic I suppose. Hope the millions are worth it.

If you know the method, it seems like you should be able to alter an arbitrary number of votes. I wouldn't think they'd have to alter them one at a time or anything.

A manipulation should stay below the threshold of noise to be inconspicuous.

Let's not pretend this is some altruistic "academic" endeavor to satiate some curiosity. This is a thought-out play borne out of the rejection of the election result by the left.

Don't you think a significant difference between districts where everything is similar except for the voting mechanism, with a trend to favor a specific candidate on one hard-to-audit mechanism is suspicious?

It might be so, but I also find reports of 3+ million illegals, 4+ million dead people, and other alleged acts of fraud to be suspicious... If we're going to go down that path it won't be pretty and it will likely involve more than just those 3 states. That said from what I read MI has already declared they've certified (recounted) their results so at this point Stein is just hustling money. I do wish technology could advance our voting systems on the whole though.. possibly block-chain based? but might require voter id! oye

Citation needed for those claims. As far as I can tell they come from a guy on twitter who refuses to share the data or explain his methodology. Parroting unverified and most likely false claims like this only serves to legitimize the fake "news sites" that publish this stuff without fact checking.

When did I "parrot" anything as truth? I said I find it highly suspicious. If you want to go down the path of "fake news" sites how about we talk about almost every major network that had Clinton winning in a landslide?