Michigan’s attorney general announced Friday he would file suit to stop a recount of the recent United States presidential votes requested by Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein.

“Today I am filing suit to stop @DrJillStein’s frivolous, expensive recount request,” Bill Schuette, a Republican, wrote on Twitter.

The state’s top law enforcement official said that he had “filed an emergency motion with the Mich Supreme Court to bypass the Court of Appeals to ensure a timely process.”

Schuette’s office later put out a statement explaining the motion.

“Michigan voters rejected Stein’s candidacy by massive margins but her refusal to accept that state-verified result poses an expensive and risky threat to hard-working taxpayers and abuses the intent of Michigan law,” Schuette said. “We have asked the court to end the recount which Stein is pursuing in violation of Michigan laws that protect the integrity of our elections. It is inexcusable for Stein to put Michigan voters at risk of paying millions and potentially losing their voice in the Electoral College in the process.”

Several supporters of President-elect Donald Trump have also moved to the courts to prevent or halt election recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Friday’s legal actions came less than two weeks before the states would have to complete the tasks to meet a federal deadline to certify their election results.

The moves seeking to block or halt the recounts in the states the Republican candidate narrowly won could cause delays that would make them extremely difficult or impossible to complete on time.

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.

Federal law requires states to resolve disputes over the appointment of electors by December 13.

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

In the popular vote, Clinton won over 2.5 million more votes than Trump, according to the Cook Political Report.

The recounts were requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who says they are necessary to ensure that voting machines were not hacked, even though there is no evidence that they were.

Stein had filed a request last week for a recount of Michigan's vote in the 2016 election after a razor-thin margin made the state the last to be called. President-elect Donald Trump ended up winning Michigan’s 16 electoral votes by just 0.2 percentage points, or just under 10,000 votes out of over 5.5 million cast.

Stein is also fighting efforts to halt the recount in Wisconsin as well, where Trump supporters have also tried to stop the recount in progress there.

“The Jill Stein Campaign plans to intervene and join the Wisconsin Elections Commission in defending the recount,” Stein’s attorney Matthew D. Brinckerhoff said in an emailed statement. “Citizens in Wisconsin and across the country have made it clear that they want a recount and deserve to see this process through to ensure integrity in the vote.”

Stein defended her decision to request a recount in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – three traditionally blue swing states that proved critical to Trump’s upset victory – in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“What we have are predictors that if tampering took place, it would be most likely to be discovered in the three states where we are looking,” she said on “Anderson Cooper 360.” “Unless we actually look, we would never know,” she said.

“But without having the evidence, aren’t you actually contributing, perhaps unfairly, to that lack of confidence in the system itself?” Cooper asked Stein.

“What the voting technology experts tell us is that you cannot tell unless you’re actually counting paper votes,” she said. “And I don’t think the FBI has done that.”

•CNN and Aljazeera. Photo shows US President-elect Donald Trump.

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