New York magazine is reporting that a group of lawyers and computer scientists is urging Hillary Clinton to challenge the election results in 3 swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked…

Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.

According to the story, the academics don’t have any evidence of hacking by any foreign government at this point, just this statistical oddity involving electronic-voting machines. Of course there could be other things that account for the difference in voting patters but since we’re not privy to any of the methodology used to generate these results it’s impossible to judge the quality of the work.

Prior to the election the FBI revealed that foreign hackers had made their way into election systems in at least two states. A Yahoo News story from August reported, “six states and parts of four others (including large swaths of Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state in this year’s race) are more vulnerable because they rely on paperless touchscreen voting, known as DREs or Direct-Recording Electronic voting machines, for which there are no paper ballot backups.”

According to Ballotpedia, Wisconsin uses a mix of paper ballots and Direct-Recording Electronic machines with a paper back-up. That means the electronic results could be tested against the paper back-up. Michigan uses paper ballots so it’s not clear there is a DRE issue in that state. Clinton would need to win all three states in order to overturn the election, though the New York piece points out that this is somewhat complicated by Democratic efforts to round up faithless electors.

The attempt to overturn the results is running out of time. New York reports, “the deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday.”

This story just went up a short while ago but already it is getting some pushback:

To follow: some *very* quick analysis which suggests the claim here of rigged results in Wisconsin is probably BS: https://t.co/SYlE76bnmQ

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016

Run a regression on Wisc. counties with >=50K people, and you find that Clinton improved more in counties with only paper ballots. HOWEVER: pic.twitter.com/4swuU70NaY

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016

…the effect COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS once you control for race and education levels, the key factors in predicting vote shifts this year. pic.twitter.com/NYOINx9lEz

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016

Maybe a more complicated analysis would reveal something, but usually bad news when a finding can't survive a basic sanity check like this.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 23, 2016