Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, conceded Tuesday that her three-state vote recount drive was "stopped in its tracks," but said she'd illuminated the need to shore up the security of balloting nationwide.
"While the count may have stopped, the movement for a voting system we can trust has been enormously energized," Stein told reporters on a conference call.
Stein raised more than $7 million to seek recounts of the presidential vote in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump narrowly won those states.
Courts have blocked recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania. The Wisconsin recount that was completed Monday wound up widening Trump's margin of victory there to 22,748 votes out of the 2,976,150 cast.
Stein denounced Trump's Cabinet appointments as "nothing short of a horror show," but said she and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson bore no responsibility for his national victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Stein's votes alone in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania exceeded Trump's victory margin over Clinton in each of those states. Clinton won the national popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes and would have captured the presidency if she'd won those three states.
Clinton aides say the minor-party candidates gained enough support from young voters in the campaign's final days to swing the election to Trump.
Stein, however, said that if she not been on the ballot, many of the Americans who voted for her would have abstained or backed Trump over Clinton.
She and several advisers on the call said a tangle of laws and regulatory obstacles in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania made it far too difficult to verify the integrity of the vote count.
They called for simplification of the nation's patchwork of voting systems, with routine audits of random samples of paper ballots to confirm the accuracy of machine tallies.
