Voting system integrity is a major issue in the United States. Because the US is a federal republic, municipalities, counties, and states are all in charge of running elections — there’s a great multiplicity in the methods used for vote tabulation and so forth. Some states have robust early voting and easy access to absentee ballots, others do not. “Voter ID” statutes are generally a bad idea, and it’s correct to challenge them. And on, and on.

But the time for litigating these various complex issues is not in the heated aftermath of a presidential election, with the final tallies still pending, and the formal result not being yet certified by the Electoral College. Inevitably, the (legitimate) issues are going to become intertwined with passions around the narrow Trump-Clinton contest. But concerns about the reliability and accuracy of voting procedure have implications far beyond the present short-term electoral situation — they are systemic, and ought to be analyzed in a context that has some remove from the intensity of campaign-season political wranglings.

That’s why Jill Stein’s lavish multi-state “recount” effort has been so damaging; it’s put a partisan gloss on matters that are highly important, but now are being viewed through the prism of cynical electoral gamesmanship. She’s conflated a wide variety of serious matters and put them under the banner of “recount,” when even her proposed “recount” gambit would do little or nothing to address the alleged problems at issue. “Recounts” ought to be used for the limited purpose of ascertaining the precise outcome of an election when the margin is close enough to warrant extra scrutiny — not as a vehicle for broaching a far wider inquiry into the nature of the election system. The latter is a job for state legislatures, discrete judicial proceedings, local governments, and Congress where appropriate.

Almost no one objecting to these “recount” efforts has argued against the notion of ascertaining the most accurate vote tallies; that’s a strawman. You can support the instatement of mandatory post-election “audits,” which a majority of states now have, without supporting the Stein “recount” crusade as it currently exists. Two states which already conduct mandatory post-election audits are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, so Stein’s calls for an “audit” are completely superfluous in that respect. In fact, she appears to have made an overt effort to blur the line between “audit” and “recount.” The Wisconsin “recount” happening now, and the Michigan one that has just been halted, were never going to be “audits” — they would never have been able to forensically determine if hacking occurred. So even if you did have reasonable cause to believe that some kind of hacking influenced the outcome of the election (which Stein does not), the methods she has advocated still would not tell you so one way or another.

No specific indicators of fraud, malfeasance, or error have thus far been produced. The rationale which led to Stein to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan could have just as easily led her to demand recounts virtually anywhere else in the country (especially New Hampshire, which was decided by a closer margin than Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but which will award its electoral votes to Clinton.) The unexplained exclusion of New Hampshire from this effort led many to reasonably extrapolate that the fundamental aim wasn’t “election integrity” as such, but ginning up hysterics and fervor so the Green Party and/or Stein would be viewed as the final guarantors of democracy, thereby reaping millions of dollars in donations and media attention.

For instance, Stein has ludicrously declared the entire Pennsylvania election “illegal,” for reasons that are entirely speculative and have no specific bearing on Pennsylvania. In other words, the rationale she invoked for deeming the Pennsylvania election “illegal” could be just as easily transposed onto Rhode Island to declare the election there “illegal” as well, because her claim is not based on anything specifically to do with Pennsylvania, but rather her overarching complaints about the US electoral system (some of which have validity, but are being presented dishonestly).

The long, arduous work of ensuring a more reliable nationwide voting system is not going to be accomplished by pointlessly inflaming partisan hysteria with talk of hacking, fraud, and illegality where none has been demonstrated to exist. In fact, doing so likely distracts from the efforts which Stein and her backers purport to want to advance.

Most of Stein’s court filings have been alarmist and petulant; they appear intended more as a cheap attention-grab than to advance reasonable arguments. Here’s Stein alleging with no basis whatsoever that unspecified “hacking” could have played some role in affecting the Pennsylvania election outcome:

If your sincere goal is to bring about real voting reforms, fomenting evidence-free paranoia about Russian hacking schemes is perhaps the worst possible way to do it. It means that “reformers” are going to go on a wild goose chase, running after threats that don’t exist, when there are real liabilities that do need to be addressed. Also note the irony in Stein giving uncritical credence to the decrees of “American intelligence agencies,” as if she wouldn’t have been among the first to demand that such claims be treated with extreme skepticism in other contexts. Repeat after me: There is still no evidence that Russian state actors carried out the DNC hack, the John Podesta email hack, voting system hacks, or any other hack related to the 2016 US presidential election. Stein opportunistically trying to create the impression that Russia somehow tipped the election for Trump is just inexcusable and has permanently tarred her reputation.

This whole issue can be distilled down to the following statement by (Obama appointee) Judge Goldsmith, who has (wisely) halted the Michigan recount and dismissed Stein’s grandiose claims as spurious:

But the beat goes on. Stein has done enough lasting damage that a segment of the populace will never view the election result as legitimate, and pursue infinite “loose ends” along these lines to prove fraud/hacking/whatever. Take a look at what Stein-supporting lawyer John Bonifaz said today on Democracy Now:

JOHN BONIFAZ: What are they afraid of? What are they afraid of why we’re going to count the votes and properly verify the process? In any functioning democracy, we should verify the vote. And it amazes me that we would want to have a cloud go over this election and continue into this next presidency without verifying the vote. We should be entitled, as voters, to ensure that the integrity of our process is protected. You know, there are two explanations for what happened on Election Day. One explanation is there was a huge hidden subset of voters who lied to the pollsters or chose not to respond to the pollsters, and they showed up on Election Day. That’s believable or not believable depending on where you sit, but it is one explanation. Another explanation, equally as believable or not believable, is that the election was compromised. And we ought to engage in verifying the vote to determine which occurred. The people of the United States have the right to know that.

So he is saying that it’s “equally believable” to attribute the election result to a polling error of around 2% as to attribute it to some kind of extravagant hacking operation, whether foreign-directed or not, which perfectly aligned with demographic trends to mask the malfeasance. This is getting to be full-fledged crackpot conspiracy garbage:

By encouraging belief in full-fledged crackpot conspiracy garbage, rather than any kind of sober, realistic assessment of what has to be done to effect real voting reform, Stein delegitimizes such efforts by making them look as though they are the province of nutjobs. That’s why I’m comfortable calling those whole stupid episode a “scam.”