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Victory! Joe BIden has won the American elections. Pictured with her running mate Kamala Harris
Oliver Douliery / AFP via Getty Images
- President Donald Trump hopes a vote recount will help keep President-elect Joe Biden out of the White House.
- As common as the stories are, only three in the past two decades have changed the outcome.
- This is how the counts work and the impact they have had.
President Donald Trump hopes a vote recount will help keep President-elect Joe Biden out of the White House, but as common as retellings are, especially for state and local candidates, only three in the past two decades have changed. the result and none. for a presidential election.
Here’s how the counts work and the impact they have had:
What is a count?
In a recount, the authorities repeat the process of counting the votes. They are a relatively common feature of American elections, although rare in presidential races.
“Counts are routine. Normal, ”said Rebecca Green, a professor at William & Mary School of Law. He said they generally show the first count to be fairly accurate, although small discrepancies are not unusual, often caused by different judgments about how to count hand-marked ballots and other issues.
States handle tallies differently, but the process comes down mostly to re-counting votes.
In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Wednesday that he had ordered a manual recount due to the closeness of the recount, though he believed the ballots had been accurately counted and there were no signs of widespread fraud.
Georgia’s latest recount put Democrat Biden ahead of Republican Trump by about 14,000 votes, 49.5% to 49.2%, a difference of 0.3% with almost all votes counted. Raffensperger told CNN that he wanted the hand count to be completed by November 20.
Georgia voters who appeared in person used a new touchscreen voting system that produced paper ballots that were fed into a scanner and counted. The absentee voters used the same ballots that went through similar scanners.
When the machines were unable to determine which candidate a voter had selected, a bipartisan group of election officials reviewed the ballot to decide whether or how it should be counted.
On the other hand, the Trump campaign has claimed, without much evidence, that it has found evidence that votes were cast on behalf of people who were dead or had moved, and that its volunteers had been prevented from scrutinizing the vote count. as close as they wanted. The recounts will not address those issues, which must be resolved in separate legal proceedings.
The process can take weeks, but some states also set a deadline to do so.
Can Trump get a recount?
Each state sets its own threshold for when to count. Some require one when elections are especially close. In Pennsylvania, one of the states critical to Biden’s victory, a recount would be required if the margin between the winning candidate and the runner-up is less than 0.5% of the votes cast in the election. But Biden led Trump there by 0.8%.
Voters in a constituency can separately request their county to recount the votes there, and the law does not set a threshold for when it should occur.
Other states like Georgia and Wisconsin allow a losing candidate to force a recount, but do not require it. Georgia allows candidates to request a recount if the margin is less than 0.5%; Wisconsin allows one if it is less than 1%. In Wisconsin, Biden led with 0.7%.
Candidates typically make those requests after a state has certified its final vote count, which has not yet happened.
Does it make any difference?
Counts rarely alter the results of an election. When they have, it has been in cases where only a few hundred votes separated the two main candidates.
A study conducted last year by the impartial group Fair Vote found that states had conducted 31 counts across the state between 2000 and 2019, and that the result changed in only three of them. That happened in a run for governor in Washington state in 2004 and in a state auditor run in Vermont in 2006.
A recount also decided the outcome of a 2008 US Senate race in Minnesota. Before the recount, incumbent Senator Norm Coleman was ahead by 215 votes; when it ended, his opponent, Al Franken, won by 225. But delayed by legal proceedings, the contest lasted so long that the US Senate seat remained vacant for six months.
More often, on a tally, the winner won by a little more. On average, they changed the result by 0.024%, Fair Vote found, a much smaller margin than Trump would need to beat Biden in any of the battlefield states where he was losing by narrow margins.
Wisconsin counted the presidential votes when Trump was elected in 2016. Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who won about 1% of the vote, sought the recount. The process added 131 votes to Trump’s account.
The most famous presidential recount took place in Florida in 2000, when George W. Bush was 1,784 votes ahead of Al Gore in a state that would determine which of them would be president. After a recount and litigation that reached the US Supreme Court, Florida finally declared that Bush had won by 537 votes.
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