Trump slams vote recount push as 'a scam'

For months Donald Trump called the US presidential election "rigged".

The president-elect has a different word - "scam" - for the recount effort aimed at revisiting the vote in three pivotal battleground states.

"The people have spoken and the election is over," Trump declared on Saturday in his first comments about the growing effort to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. He added, "We must accept this result and then look to the future."

Green Party nominee Jill Stein's fight for a recount got a major boost on Friday when Wisconsin officials announced they were moving forward with the first presidential recount in state history.

The incoming president had been paying little if any attention to Stein's recount push, but Democratic rival Hillary Clinton forced his hand on Saturday by formally joining the effort.

Stein, who drew one per cent of the vote nationally, is raising millions of dollars to fund the recounts.

"Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves," Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias wrote Saturday in a blog post.

"But now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides."

Elias said Clinton would take the same approach in Pennsylvania and Michigan if Stein were to follow through with recount requests those states, even though that was highly unlikely to change the election outcome.