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Presidential recount underway. What's your take on it?
— This is a plot to distract the country from the stupendous Election-Day fraud in which millions of dead people cast their votes for Hillary Clinton.
— Is it going to get rid of Donald Trump? If it isn't, I don't care. I don't care about anything. Excuse me, I'm going back to bed.
Wow, happy holidays.
Yes, it's true the postelection nation is still divided, this time between the folks who don't want to believe Trump is going to be president and the ones who don't want to hear that more people actually voted for Hillary.
But about the recount: The star of this show is Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president. On Wednesday Stein's lawyers filed paperwork to force Michigan to recheck its vote tallies. She's also getting a recount in Wisconsin and she's working on Pennsylvania.
[Green Party raises $2.5 million for recount in Wisconsin]
Since Stein got only 51,463 votes in Michigan to Trump's 2,279,543, this would seem like an exercise in … um, futility? Deeply cynical minds think the real goal might just be to increase her donor database — her recount campaign has drawn more than $6 million. But Stein says she wants to demonstrate the need to reform the nation's extremely messy voting system.
"It's a healing and positive thing to examine the vote," she said in a phone interview.
Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by 10,704 under the current count. Virtually no one — certainly not the Clinton lawyers — thinks she's going to make that up in a recount. However, it's definitely possible Clinton could have gotten 10,705 votes more if Stein had stayed off the ballot in the first place.
"Jill Stein is the friend who ruins your wedding but really shows up for you during the divorce," twittered comedian Morgan Murphy.
Stein claims most of her supporters wouldn't have voted for anybody if the Green Party hadn't been an option. But even if she did make a difference, she doesn't care. "I don't regard one candidate as preferable to the other," she said.
We had heard something similar from Ralph Nader, whose presence on the ballot in 2000 probably cost Al Gore Florida, and the presidency.
On many of Nader's issues, Gore was not great. But the point of the American system of democracy is that in the end, you often have to take the responsibility for choosing the better of two unlovely options. And if Gore had been elected, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Case closed.
Knowing what we know now, do you think the best thing the Greens could have done to battle global warming would have been running around trying to get attention for Jill Stein, or working like maniacs to support Clinton and keep Donald Trump out of the White House?
"In my view they're both lethal to the environment," said Stein.
In my view, the Green Party screwed up, big time. We will think of it from now on as the Chartreuse Party.
[Election recounts proceed in three states, but reversals unlikely]
The one positive effect of the recount, besides reassuring people who worry the Russians might be capable of hacking a massive American vote tally, is the way it reminds the nation, every day, that Donald Trump is one of the least successful yet successful presidential candidates in American history.
He lost the popular vote to Clinton by more than 2 million votes. Due to our extremely strange Electoral College system, five men have gotten elected president even though more people voted for their opponent. But no one in modern history has come anywhere near Trump's ginormous negative accomplishment.
The only presidential victor since the Civil War who did worse was Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican who lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden in 1876 and won the electoral tally only after Republicans challenged the results in four states, all of which were finally decided by a Republican-dominated electoral commission on party-line votes. Everybody accused everybody else of fraud.
It was an election dominated by economic fear and racism. However, Hayes never claimed "millions of people" in the contested states voted illegally, like another candidate we can think of. Perhaps Hayes decided winners don't whine. Perhaps it was because there were not yet millions of voters.
It's important for our mental health to accept that the current recount isn't going to change the election results, although it's theoretically conceivable additional legal challenges could make it impossible for anybody to win the necessary 270 votes when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 19. That would throw the decision over to the Republican-controlled Congress, and an obscure procedure that happened once before, when John Quincy Adams defeated Andrew Jackson.
I'm bringing that up just so I can note that John Quincy Adams is the only person besides Rutherford B. Hayes who won the presidency with a worse negative percentage of the popular vote than Donald Trump. Big loser! Sad!
O.K., done ranting. For today.
I invite you to join me on Facebook.
Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion).
The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email to commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.