Since former Green Party candidate Jill Stein started her election recount effort, the same big three TV networks that essentially ignored her presidential campaign have discovered she is worth reporting on.

Indeed the Nets have given her twelve times more coverage in the last five days than they gave her entire nearly two-year bid for the White House.

A survey of coverage of Stein’s Green Party bid for the White House finds that ABC, CBS, and NBC gave Stein’s campaign a scant 36 seconds of coverage combined across all three networks during the entire time she was running for president. But since she announced her recount effort late last week, the Nets have suddenly given Stein a full seven minutes and 26 seconds of coverage, according to the Media Research Center.

Stein jumped to her recount campaign the day before the Thanksgiving holiday and mysteriously raised four million dollars in two days to fund recounts in three states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. No one can say where all this money came from. Recounts will cost up to a million dollars or more for each state.

Since she began the recount effort, Stein has claimed she may expand the campaign to even more states. But thus far she has filed an official petition only in Wisconsin. The state’s election board has noted that it will go ahead with a recount if Stein comes up with the cost up front.

Many question the actual purpose of the recount, since few experts imagine that it will change the results of the November 8 election. Pollster and political strategist Pat Caddell told Breitbart News’ Matt Boyle that the recount was little more than an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the forthcoming Trump administration.

There have been no reports of hacking or any other major irregularities during the election to justify any recounts, but President-elect Donald Trump has noted that if the illegal votes of millions of undocumented aliens were eliminated, we might just find that he won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote.

Voter integrity organization True The Vote agrees with Trump that millions of illegals voted in this past election, having a negative impact on the election.

The Texas-based group said in a statement

True the Vote absolutely supports President-elect Trump’s recent comment about the impact of illegal voting, as reflected in the national popular vote. We are still collecting data and will be for several months, but our intent is to publish a comprehensive study on the significant impact of illegal voting in all of its many forms and begin a national discussion on how voters, states, and the Trump Administration can best address this growing problem.

Meanwhile, during the campaign for president, Hillary Clinton slammed Trump for saying that he might not accept the outcome of the election if he lost. She called such an idea a “direct threat to our democracy.”

Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election. That’s a direct threat to our democracy. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 24, 2016

Yet, now Clinton said she would join the recount effort in direct contravention of her claim that it was un-American to doubt the results of an election.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.