Jill Stein has told the Democratic faithful that there’s a chance Donald Trump’s dramatic upset could be reversed. And in theory, the presidential nominee of the Green Party is right.
Of the thousands of statewide elections held since 2000, FiveThirtyEight’s Carl Bialik points out, only 27 contests have triggered recounts and only three have reversed the original result. Statistically, that makes Clinton’s path to the White House an extreme long shot, not an absolute impossibility. But the odds are a lot longer if you assume (in the absence of any evidence to the contrary) there hasn’t been a massive mistabulation in multiple states.
Although Clinton hasn’t called for a recount, the defeated Democrat isn’t standing in the way. Even though no evidence of fraud has been discovered, Clinton legal counsel and Democratic superlawyer Marc Elias announced Saturday that her campaign would supervise the effort spearheaded by Stein in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Democrats would need that three state hat-trick to reverse Republican’s victory. If successful across the board, the new score would be 278 electoral votes for Clinton to Trump’s 260. And Elias seemed optimistic Saturday, noting that the “combined margin of victory for Donald Trump was merely 107,000 votes.”
That means that of the more than 120 million ballots cast, the presidential election was decided by about as many voters as the population of Green Bay, Wisconsin. While that’s a small fraction, it is an enormous amount of votes to overturn in a recount.
Consider: When Al Gore demanded a Florida recount in 2000, he managed to claw back 1,247 votes from George Bush before losing by 537. By the standard of recounts, that’s a pretty big number already. And Clinton would have to do better by a factor of almost 100.
All three successful recounts resulted in Democratic victories. Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a Virginia auditor, and former Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire took their seats after rehashing the original outcome. Each contest was decided by less than 350 votes. Clinton’s cumulative deficit is about 300 times bigger.
In theory, it could work. So could the lottery as a retirement strategy. And Clinton’s biggest impediment isn’t the already daunting arithmetic, it’s the politics. If the margins somehow narrowed after a recount, Clinton would also need to eat her concession speech, and the White House would have to tear off the seal of approval it has already placed on the election’s integrity.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
