Green Party candidate Jill Stein Tuesday flatly denied billionaire George Soros is behind her quest for ballot recounts, saying that even if he would happen to donate money toward the effort, it would be returned.
"Our donors will all be disclosed," Stein told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" co-host Martha McCallum. "All of the 140,000 of them last I checked. The average donation is $45. Wherever the voters are coming from, these are regular people throwing in small donations so that we can have a government that is about us everyday people. There is not some giant thunder here."
"Are you sure about that?" MacCallum responded, later asking if Stein was "confident" the millions that have been raised for the recount weren't boosted by money from Soros.
"Absolutely," Stein said. "Under campaign finance laws, we are limited to $2,700 to start with, and we have the numbers to show that 99.5 percent of the donors are all under $1,000 and the average donation is $45. So we'll be disclosing those numbers. They have to be public record."
And as for Soros, whether he made a donation of $45 or $2,700, "we would return it," said Stein.
She also denied that Hillary Clinton's campaign is using her to run a recount.
"When I was asked throughout the campaign, would I stand up and file for a recount if there was doubt about the credibility of the vote, I always said yes, and it was not contingent on who won," said Stein. She also pointed out she took "terrible heat" during the election when she would not say if she favored one candidate over the other.
Stein said she also did not seek the recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin to implicate election administrators, who work very hard.
"But there is plenty of evidence that these machines do malfunction," Stein said. "They are subject to machine error and human errors. Ninety thousand votes were recounted in the past. You cannot see the evidence unless you count the paper votes and find out. Otherwise you wouldn't know. Voters deserve the assurance we can be confident in the vote. We are doing this to help voters restore their confidence in the vote."
She also said she would have pushed for recounts even if President-elect Donald Trump have lost, and she'll seek more recounts if problems are found.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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