State more than triples Wisconsin cost to $3.5 million.

The Green Party's presidential recount faced its first on-the-ground challenges in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Monday, as the first obstacles arose to the comprehensive recount it seeks and the party filed its first lawsuits to expand the process.

In Wisconsin, where the Greens' recount petition was accepted Friday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission set a timetable for the process starting Thursday, but rejected Jill Stein’s request that all paper ballots be counted by hand, as opposed to using high-speed electronic scanners. The WEC said each of its state’s 72 county election offices could decide what they would do. That led the Greens to file a lawsuit later in the day seeking statewide hand counts, supported by statements from a half-dozen of the foremost computer security experts in academia who have studied voting system vulnerabilities.

Later in the day, the WEC announced the recount filing fee would be $3.5 million, which is more than three times the $1.1 million estimate expected by the Greens as of last weekend. To date, Jill Stein's presidential campaign has raised $6.3 million.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, the Greens, election integrity activists, Democratic Party members, MoveOn.org and others were scurrying to file citizen recount petitions at county election offices. The Green Party faces an almost insurmountable obstacle. It needs three voters from each of the state’s 9,163 precincts to sign and submit petitions, a monumental task, at the same time as a five-day filing window for the recount is closing county-by-county across the state. In an estimated dozen counties, that filing period is already over. On Monday, it submitted recount petitions to 200 precincts.