Three days before Christmas, Matt Bernhard, Halderman’s doctoral student, sat alone in an office at the University of Michigan, tapping on a computer. The semester had ended a week earlier, and the computer science building was dark and silent. But Bernhard was hard at work poring over the data from the recounts in Wisconsin and Michigan.

“It would be incredibly hypocritical to spend all this time saying you need to do a recount because you need to check that there was no fraud, and then not check the recount to make sure there was no fraud,” he says. “That’s what most people did. They said, ‘Well, we did the recount, the results were the same, let’s go home.’ That’s not the point.”

Unfortunately, the data doesn’t make the point of the recount any clearer. The Michigan data set is so incomplete—just 40 percent of the state’s 4.8 million votes were recounted before the process was halted—that it provides little insight one way or the other. In Wisconsin, the only state that finished the process, there was no evidence to indicate that anyone stole the election. The hand recount did find that three percent of the 13,800 ballots scanned using an Optech III-P Eagle machine were miscounted. That’s less than 400 votes changed—but the errors followed no apparent pattern, and did not favor either Trump or Clinton. “That indicates that these are just crappy voting machines and we shouldn’t be using them,” Bernhard says.

Bernhard insists that he is comforted by these results. The country’s election system, he concludes, produced a true and accurate reflection of the people’s will. While there is no way to know what security experts might have found if they had been permitted to conduct a forensic examination of Pennsylvania’s machines, Bernhard declares himself “probably the most convinced person in the world that Donald Trump won Wisconsin.”

Bonifaz and Halderman remain less certain. In early December, when President Barack Obama declared that he was confident that no voting machines had been hacked, Bonifaz was incredulous. “How can he know that?” he growled. Later that month, during a presentation at a computer security convention in Germany, Halderman said that because the recounts weren’t completed, scientists can’t conclude that the 2016 election was hack-free.

By raising the alarm when there was no sign of smoke, security activists may have made it harder to force recounts when they’re really needed.

In the end, it’s not clear that anyone benefited from the recount. Trump gained a handful of votes in Wisconsin, and Clinton picked up a few in Michigan. Other than that, nothing of consequence was resolved. As countless investigations have shown—and recent events have confirmed—the threat of malicious hacking and machine error remains a very real threat to our democratic process. If election results can’t be trusted, then the legitimacy of the representative system itself is called into question. Yet despite all the expense and the drama and the partisan bickering over the recounts, Halderman and his colleagues failed to advance public understanding of the serious risks posed by electronic voting machines. Indeed, the argument could be made that by raising the alarm when there was no sign of smoke, advocates for election security may have made it harder to force recounts when they’re really needed.

“People will be wondering whether all of this was necessary,” Halderman says. “I hope the outcome is positive policy change—that people won’t go back to state capitals and make recounts harder to do.” In fact, the Michigan legislature did just that during the recount fight, introducing a bill that would significantly increase the costs of a recount sought by a candidate who lost by as much as Stein. The measure was dropped after the recount ended, but it’s likely that Republicans will use their dominance in state legislatures to make it harder to scrutinize the outcome of questionable elections.

“I don’t think the whole process was particularly productive,” says Michael Slaby, who served as chief technology officer for Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It cost millions of dollars, and President Trump ended up with more votes in Wisconsin. That doesn’t seem like a good result.”

For his part, Halderman remains baffled by such reasoning. To him, proving that the process worked is just as valuable as showing that it erred. As a scientist, he believes that the democratic experiment must yield verifiable results if it is to be accepted as valid. What matters isn’t proving that there was wrongdoing in any given election. What matters is subjecting our system of elections to constant and careful scrutiny, to ensure that our voting technology stays one step ahead of those who seek to disrupt it.

“The machinery of democracy should be answering the questions we’ve asked,” Halderman says. “We are further from a safe system than I thought we were before the election. That bothers me. That’s not the way democracy should work.”