How Does the Recount of Election Results Work?
Despite losing the November elections by a significant margin in the Electoral College and a historic share of the popular vote, Donald Trump’s legal team has made a series of so far futile attempts to give the president a second term.
Since November 3, Trump’s lawyers have suffered a string of defeats in federal courts in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan. Now the White House is studying the final recount of voting results in the states of Georgia, where President-elect Joe Biden won by a landslide in 14,000 votes, and Wisconsin , where Biden regained the territory, which the Democrats lost in 2016, at a compelling 20 000 votes. votes.
Historically, a recount has made little difference to the election results, especially when the winner gets tens of thousands of votes. So what is the logic behind the recount then?
What is election recount?
The answer is simple. A recount in an election is a recount of votes in an election because the initial result was too close to be finalized, or when one candidate, group of voters, or another party requests a recount, usually because they lost.
The process for requesting a recount is a little more complicated and varies by state law – there is no basic set of rules for how these things are done at the federal level.
Requested recalculations versus automatic recalculations
Some states have legal provisions that trigger automatic recounts. If the outcome was subtle, or if there was a serious administrative error or suspicion of fraud in any meaningful way, the process will automatically go into effect in 21 states and Washington, DC where these laws apply. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, an automatic recount is “performed if the difference between the two best candidates is within certain parameters.” In keeping with the confusing and fragmented makeup of the United States government, these “specific parameters” are different in every state that has automatic recalculation.
In addition to the automatic process, 43 states and Washington DC have additional laws to request a recount, as do most of the 21 states that trigger automatic recounts under various circumstances. The little things here also represent a bewildering confusion of various state rules, but the common denominator is a rule that allows “a losing candidate, voter, constituency or other interested party to petition for recount,” according to NCSL.
Perhaps even more confusing, the states of Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New York, and South Carolina have not established any legal procedures at all to arrange for the requested recount.
What is the logic behind the recalculation?
Human error permeates every aspect of life, so it is theoretically possible that the final count of elections will contain inaccuracies that go so far as to tarnish the democratic process. In even rarer cases, it is possible that a fair vote is too close to a statement. Florida’s vote count for the 2000 presidential election met those criteria as the country watched with bated breath as the contest was recounted that was ultimately split by 537 of the state’s six million votes. (Be that as it may, the full official recount of 2,000 Sunshine State votes was never completed, but was ultimately conducted by a coalition of major news organizations with fuzzy results – you can read the details here , but you might want to take a few deep breaths first. if you’re a Gore fan.)
Florida in 2000 was an anomaly, however, and given the difference in Biden’s victory over Trump even in Georgia, the current recount is unlikely to change the outcome.
It all boils down to mathematics and probability, according to Dr. Alex Rice, assistant professor of mathematics at Millsaps College. He explained to Lifehacker how rarely a significant error is actually found on recounts in the absence of rampant fraud (for which, again, there is no hard evidence) and technical problems, using a math example:
Suppose, hypothetically, that Biden’s leadership in a given state is 10,000 votes, and suppose it is human error that 5% of the time the count is biased by 10,000 or more votes. (5% is an arbitrary figure based on the usual threshold of statistical significance. Historical recalculations show that the probability is actually much lower.)
If the truth is that Trump won with, say, one vote, then 2.5% of the time the tally would be +10,000 Biden (or more) (the other 2.5% would be +10,000 Trump or more). But the probability that this extreme human error will occur twice in a row, assuming that the errors are independent, is 2.5% of 2.5%, which is 1 in 1600 or 0.06%.
In other words, if a Biden reading of +10,000 or so is received the second time around, it will be an extremely unlikely event in reality in which Trump is the true winner, much more likely than the first time.
Will the current recalculations change anything?
If you’ve learned anything from Rice’s explanation, the answer is almost certainly no. Biden’s leadership appears to have diminished slightly, but not enough to hand over the state to Trump, as Georgia polls go through millions of state votes in a manual audit . And even if the counting were canceled in Georgia, it still wouldn’t be enough to tip the scales in Trump’s favor to win the Electoral College , especially given that Wisconsin is also out of sight of the incumbent.
However, it is worth noting the damage done to our system of government and public confidence in transparent and free elections due to the president’s insistence that the entire process was rigged against him.