Talk about throwing bad money after ... well, more bad money. Green Party candidate Jill Stein is on a campaign to get a recount of election results in three states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. And if you think it’s a dog-and-pony show, think again.

As of Friday she’d raised a whopping $4.6 million (more than she raised during her presidential campaign). As of Sunday the campaign of defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton had pledged to participate in any recounts initiated by Stein — who filed paperwork in Wisconsin on Friday to begin the process there.

Clinton’s campaign, for better or worse, is trying to walk a tightrope. They say investigations haven’t turned up any evidence of manipulated results, but that they also have an “obligation” to participate in any recount Stein sets in motion, to “ensure that an accurate vote count will be reported.”

They’d be far better-served to say what many Democrats already believe: this is an exercise in futility, the only function of which will be eroding the electorate’s faith in the security and accuracy of the election, and giving strength to the Russian-driven storyline that American democracy is flimsy and failing.

Stein, for whatever reason, appears to have bought that story hook, line and sinker. Last week she explained her recount campaign as the result of a “hack-riddled election,” and “machines that are extremely hack-friendly.”

Two problems here: first, voting machines can’t be hacked from afar according to election security experts. Second — and perhaps more importantly — most voters in Pennsylvania use direct record electronic (DRE) machines. There’s no paper ballot against which to check any hacked results anyway, and the effort couldn’t prove a thing.

If a recount wouldn’t expose hacking, then Stein’s camp must be convinced there’s a possibility of changing the result. Apparently that’s not it either, according to Carl Romanelli, Stein’s campaign field coordinator in Pennsylvania.

“I don’t want anyone to think this is about changing the outcome of the election,” he said Friday.

Without any possibility of unearthing fraud, and any expectation of altering the current result, what’s the point of a recount? It’s clear that Stein’s camp doesn’t have a good reason.

The good news is that people can actually turn this multi-million-dollar fiasco into something productive. They can start talking about the need to repeal DRE machines, and the need for mandatory statistical audits of elections.

Ron Rivest, a cryptographer and computer science professor at MIT, told Wired magazine last week that such efforts should be the norm during every election, not a special case initiated by one party or the other.

“An election should provide accurate results, and it should provide credible results." said Rivest. “We shouldn’t be in the situation we’re in right now. We should know that the outcome is the correct one.”

It’s up to voters, who have forked over millions of dollars, to make these recounts into something more than a joke.