Green Party's Stein drops Pennsylvania presidential recount bid

Green Party candidate Jill Stein abruptly dropped her bid to seek a recount of the presidential election vote in Pennsylvania after a judge ordered her campaign to post a $1 million bond, a spokesman said on Saturday.

"Petitioners are regular citizens of ordinary means. They cannot afford to post the $1,000,000 bond required by the court," an attorney for the Stein campaign wrote in court papers, according to an email from spokesman Sam Scarrow.

"How odd is it that we must jump through bureaucratic hoops and raise millions of dollars so we can trust our election results?" Stein said on Twitter.

The campaign of Republican President-elect Donald Trump had requested a $10 million bond, court papers showed.

Stein, who garnered only about 1 percent of the vote, has also sought recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin, saying that she wants to ensure the integrity of the U.S. voting system.

Trump, who beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election, has called the recount effort a "scam."

Clinton's campaign has said it would take part in the recounts.

Even if all of the recounts were to take place, they are extremely unlikely to change the overall outcome of the election.

The presidential race is decided by the Electoral College, or a tally of wins from the state-by-state contests, rather than by the popular national vote.

Trump surpassed the 270 electoral votes needed to win, with 306 electoral votes, and the recount would have to flip the result to Clinton in all three states to change the overall result.

In the popular vote, Clinton had a margin of more than 2.5 million votes over Trump, the Cook Political Report said.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Bill Rigby and Tom Brown)