Jill Stein’s Recounts Are Destructive to Democracy

As if we haven’t already had an excess of presidential election madness this year, now comes a bit player with 1% of the vote demanding recounts.

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, has officially filed papers to seek a complete manual recount of ballots in Wisconsin, where Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 22,000 votes, and in Michigan, which Trump won by 11,000 votes; she’s also seeking a recount in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by 71,000 votes. Stein admits to having zero evidence of voting improprieties to justify the recount, only “grave concerns.” Nonetheless, she successfully raised more than $6 million to fund her efforts. And now the Clinton campaign, which also disclaims evidence of misconduct, has said it will support them. (There is no evidence the Clinton campaign put Stein up to her feckless frolic.)

Needless to say, these developments irked Trump, who reacted with a fact-free assertion that millions of fraudulent votes had given Clinton the popular-vote victory, an unforced error providing credence to the otherwise baseless Stein-Clinton recount requests.

But they should irk the American people as well. Recounts should be reserved for seriously close races where there are legitimate, credible claims of misconduct, error or fraud–especially in presidential elections, where faith in the system is essential to the vital task of governing this country. That’s not to say they’re never justified: Al Gore, for example, had ample reason to insist on a recount in Florida 16 years ago when initial counts had him trailing George Bush by a razor-thin margin (whatever one might think of the absurd manner in which the recount was attempted). But when the outcome is clear and the winner has begun the serious work of assembling a new government–a difficult task in the best of times–recounts are expensive, time-consuming distractions. Richard Nixon did the right thing in 1960 when he declined to challenge Jack Kennedy’s questionable victory in Illinois and elsewhere. Gore, similarly, graciously conceded after his unsuccessful challenges to the Florida vote in 2000.

Presidential elections are by their very nature contentious. The stakes are high, the battles intense and drawn out, the emotions rubbed raw. But the Constitution and federal statutes specify timetables that require all questions about the tabulation of votes be resolved promptly after the November election and well before the Inauguration. The nation depends on peaceful acceptance of the outcomes of presidential elections. Unnecessarily prolonging a divisive contest is corrosive and destructive to democracy.

Olson served as Solicitor General under George W. Bush, whom he represented in Bush v. Gore