A friend on Facebook suggests that the recounts in the Rust Belt, and similar strategies that challenge the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s election, are a “canny” strategy to provoke the president-elect into spending all his time on Twitter, issuing thin-skinned tweets like this weekend’s unlikely claim that if you subtracted the number of illegal immigrants who voted, he would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote.

My Trump supporting readers will point out that I don’t know Trump’s claim to be false. That’s fair. And so I said “unlikely.” There is scant data available.

But Trump offered no evidence that it was true, and it was a wildly irresponsible thing for our president-elect to say. It is corrosive to our already-frail civic institutions.

One of those bedrock institutions is the legitimacy of election results. It is often observed that the true test of democracy is not whether an election is held; it is whether the loser accepts the outcome. If elections lack legitimacy, then our officials, and the laws they make, are always up for contest. No one can make plans, because they don’t know how long the current regime will last. Worse still, the opponents of that regime will have few qualms about resorting to violence to hasten that end — nor will the regime hesitate to use terror and extralegal tactics to hold on to power.