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Hillary Clinton is being urged by expert computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Trump, publication New York has reported.

Persuasive evidence has reportedly been found that shows results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.

The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Centre for Computer Security and Society, is lobbying Clinton’s team privately before going on the record about their findings.

Their findings apparently show a trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners.

Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30 000 votes. She lost Wisconsin by 27 000.

The vote in Michigan has still not been called as the results were too close – and the 16 electoral votes in the state have not been given to Trump or Clinton.

Clinton would need to win Michigan and overturn the results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to win the electoral college.

Time is of the essence if Clinton is to pursue challenging the results. The deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday.

Both Trump and Clinton have declined to respond to questions regarding the report, CNN says.

Meanwhile, Trump “doesn’t wish to pursue” further investigations into Hillary Clinton’s email practices, a top advisor said on Tuesday, a turnaround from all the campaign rallies when Trump roused supporters to chants of “lock her up.”

“I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal then perhaps that’s a good thing,” Kellyanne Conway said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.

That comes after months of Trump nicknaming his Democratic rival “Crooked Hillary,” questioning whether the Clinton Foundation is a pay-for-play scheme and raging against the Justice Department for refusing to prosecute her for blending private and official business on her homebrew email server. He told her face-to-face at a presidential debate that if he won the presidency, she’d “be in jail.”

Conway’s comments were striking because Justice Department investigations are historically conducted without the influence or input of the White House. Presidents do not dictate decisions on which criminal investigations are pursued or their outcome.

The disparity between Trump’s taunts on the campaign trail and his approach now, Conway suggested, is part of a purposeful shift away from at least the tone, if not the substance, of his past rhetoric.

“I think he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States and things that sound like the campaign aren’t among them,” she said.

Trump himself has appeared to waver on whether he would want to seek further probes into possible wrongdoing by the Clintons.

“I’m going to think about it,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview, his first sit-down interview after the November 8 election. “I feel that I want to focus on jobs, I want to focus on health care, I want to focus on the border and immigration and doing a really great immigration bill. We want to have a great immigration bill. And I want to focus on – all of these other things that we’ve been talking about.”

Trump said in that interview that Clinton “did some bad things,” but ultimately the Clintons are “good people” and “I don’t want to hurt them.”

Conway’s comments came as Trump abruptly cancelled a meeting with The New York Times on Tuesday, accusing the organisation of changing the conditions for the session “at the last moment.” The newspaper denied this and said Trump’s aides tried to change the rules. But Hope Hicks, speaking for Trump, said later the meeting was back on and he’d be “going to The New York Times” later on Tuesday.

Trump met privately on Monday with representatives of the television networks.

The president-elect heralded “more great meetings” in his Manhattan tower as he continues shaping his administration before heading to Florida for Thanksgiving on Tuesday. — AFP