#Recount2016: Frequently Asked Questions
Jill Stein has published #Recount2016: Frequently Asked Questions.
Here is a generally informative FAQ about the recount. However, I must object to one trick that all candidates and all the corporate news media play.
How much have you raised so far?
As of 10 a.m. Eastern Time, on Wednesday, November 30, the Stein Recount had received more than $6.55 million in mainly small-dollar donations. More than 144,000 contributors donated an average of $48. That average contribution amount has remained steady since we began fundraising for the three-state recount. To illustrate the grassroots quality of this effort, only a little more than 400 contributors donated $1,000 or more, representing about 0.5 percent all recount donors.
I don’t care about the fraction of donors. I care about the fraction of the money donated.
If 400 people gave the legal maximum of $2,700 each, then they gave a total of $1,080,000. The remaining amount, $5,470,000 was donated by 143,600 people at an average of $38 per person. So 0.3% of the donors could have given 16% of the money. I bet those 400 people would get more attention than the 143,600 others.
So you see that the number quoted by Stein, and similarly Sanders and Clinton, is a totally useless way of telling you about the influence of large contributions. If there were a single reporter in all the corporate news media around the world who had a modicum of math skills, they would point out this fallacy every time someone quoted the useless statistic.