We have just completed a narrow, hard fought election. Given the ongoing economic crisis and pandemic, the country should begin the peaceful transfer of power.

President Trump has indicated he will pursue legal challenges. The chances of a recount turning tens of thousands of votes in his favor are outside anything we have seen in American history.

When compared with other close elections, this one is actually quite a comfortable victory for President-elect Biden. The Biden-Harris ticket has won or is significantly ahead in states with 306 electoral votes.

For Trump to win, he must flip at least 3 of the 4 narrowest margins of defeat. He either must convince courts to disqualify tens of thousands of ballots or have recounts overturn results in three of the four closest “tipping point” states that put Biden over the 270 threshold.

The margin of victory in the four tipping point states is quite similar those which President Trump won in the 2016 election, when he won 306 electoral votes in a mirror image of this year’s election.

His margins of victory were slightly larger in 2016 than Biden’s are in 2020, but Trump must go deeper down the list to collect enough electoral votes to reverse the outcome.

Past recounts have changed hundreds of ballots but typically not thousands. According to a study by FairVote, only twice since 2000 have recount vote swings been greater than 1,000.

https://fairvote.app.box.com/v/recounts 

Both happened in 2000, when Al Gore picked up 1,247 votes in the Florida presidential race, and a statewide race in Colorado reversed 1,121 votes. Between 2000-2015, the median swing was just over 200 votes – often in favor of the candidate in the lead.

The country has seen much closer vote totals than the current one. The two most famous “contested elections” are 2000 and 1876. The 2020 election was not as close as either.

In 2000 Bush-Gore in Florida, one state alone would have decided the outcome, leading to nearly 2 months of recounts and court battles. By comparison, Biden’s slimmest lead is over 10,000 votes in Georgia, which is over five times larger than Bush’s initial Florida lead of 1,784.

In the 1876 election, pitting Rutherford Hayes against Samuel Tilden, narrow margins in South Carolina (889), Florida (922), Oregon (1,057), and Louisiana (4,807) led to a four-month stalemate.