Wisconsin Officials Receive Recount Payment From Jill Stein

The Wisconsin Elections Commission announced that it has received the required payment from Jill Stein to start the presidential recount in the state later this week.

The former Green Party presidential candidate previously submitted a petition for a recount in Wisconsin, and she paid the required $3,499,689 set by the commission via bank wire transfer, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission announced that amount as the required fee to start the recount process, but in its announcement today it noted that "there was an error in adding up figures" from the state's 72 county clerks, so the actual total is $3,898,340. However, it is not requiring Stein to pay that new total "at this time." Instead, the elections commission said it will wait until the actual costs are reported and either bill Stein for any excess charges or return any unused funds.

The second petitioner for the recount, fellow third party candidate Roque "Rocky" De La Fuente, withdrew his recount petition today.

According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Donald Trump won the state with 1,404,000 votes, and Hillary Clinton came in second with 1,381,823 votes -- a difference of 22,177 votes. Stein had 31,006 votes, and De La Fuente had 1,514 votes.

"I fully expect, given the history of how elections are conducted in Wisconsin ... that the outcome is not going to be different" from the current results, Mark Thomsen, the chairman of the state's elections commission, said at a news conference Monday.

Stein has said that she was calling for the recount "because of the vulnerability of ... voting systems and various indicators of concern," though she admitted that she does not expect the outcome of the election to change. Clinton's team said it will support the recount effort.

Trump tweeted that the recount was a "scam" on behalf of the Green Party and later made the unsubstantiated claim that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally." His claims have not been independently verified, and election officials from numerous states -- including Wisconsin -- have criticized Trump's claim of having won the popular vote nationwide and said that there was no widespread illegal voting in their states.

Stein set up a fundraising page on her website last week, saying that the money raised would be put toward recount efforts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

According to the site, she had raised nearly $6.5 million for the efforts as of Tuesday evening.