Mere hours after Cass County officials finished sorting and counting the more than 22,000 local ballots cast last month for U.S. president, a federal judge effectively ended the ongoing statewide recount Wednesday afternoon.

U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith — the same person who ordered the recount of ballots across Michigan’s 83 counties Monday — sided with a recent decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals to reject Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s petition to re-tabulate the state’s presidential election votes cast Nov. 8 during a hearing in Detroit. Goldsmith’s decision put a halt to the proceedings, as the Michigan Board of Canvassers decided in a 3 to 1 vote earlier Wednesday to end the recount in the event the judge lifted his earlier order.

For members of the Michigan GOP — including those in Cass County — the judge’s decision marked the end of a messy and unnecessary complication in an already tumultuous election, which saw Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton with 306 electoral votes to her 232 — in spite of losing the popular vote to the former secretary of state.

Trump narrowly won the vote in Michigan on Election Day, triumphing over Clinton by slightly more than 10,000 votes.

“It [the recount] was a fiasco to begin with,” said Andy Anderson, incoming chair of the Cass County Republicans. “You had a candidate in Jill Stein — who ran on the very fringe of political theory — challenging the results of the election when she admitted she had very little to base that challenge on. It seemed like a waste of tax payer’s money.”

In spite of only receiving around 1 percent of votes from Michigan residents in November, Stein filed for a recount last week in order to verify the integrity of the state’s voting systems. She and her campaign also issued challenges to the votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — two other states Trump won, by larger margins than in Michigan.

Even before the state recount process began on Monday, several parties filed motions opposing Stein’s request — including the Michigan GOP. These factions cited a number of reasons for their opposition, including the potential burden it would place on state taxpayers as well as the fact Stein could not provide evidence of vote tampering.

In his decision, Judge Goldsmith cited the second reason as justification for the ruling, saying Stein’s campaign could only provide speculation on possible fraud rather than concrete proof of it.

“If there was a legitimate reason for a recount, no Republican would oppose it,” Anderson said. “But this was a waste of time and money, especially when the people behind it have admitted there would not be any substantial change to the vote totals. Why even go through the effort to do so?”

In spite of his opposition, Anderson — a certified election official — volunteered to help with Wednesday’s recount in Cass County, which took place at Southwestern Michigan College. The process went fairly smoothly and quickly, ending around 3 p.m. that day with little changes to vote totals recorded on Election Day, he said.

“[Clerk] Monica Kennedy and her crew had it very well organized, and that made for the smoothness of it,” Anderson said.

Anderson’s counterpart in the opposing party, Cass County Democrat Chair Cathy LaPointe, was also present at Wednesday’s recount, overseeing the proceedings. A supporter of Stein’s recount request, she was devastated to hear the state’s decision to prematurely end the effort, she said.

“It is our constitutional right to free and fair elections,” LaPointe said. “The fact they [the state] are shutting it down is stunning. It smacks of repression and suppression.”

The Democrat rejected claims by the state GOP that the recount effort was cost prohibitive, as no one could provide an exact price tag on how much the process would ultimately cost the state and that Stein’s campaign was helping offset some of the costs, she said.

She also criticized some of the state’s rules and practices for the recount process, which led to some precincts having ballots unable to re-tabulated, especially in the Detroit area, she said.

The GOP’s opposition to the recount effort also furthers the divide between supporters of the incoming president and those who voted him against in him in November, LaPointe said.

“If there was a chance of us working together again, this definitely undermines that,” she said. “We just do not trust each other.”

In spite of her feelings about the dissolution of the recount, LaPointe was complementary of the performance by members of both parties Wednesday during the local count.

“It went off really well,” she said. “It reinforces the fact that here in Cass County our elections are run very well by our clerk and election inspectors.”