Do recounts/recanvasses make a difference?

[RealityChuck]

I’m trying to remember a time when a recount ended with a candidate winning who hadn’t been ahead at the end of Wednesday after election day.

There are a few local contests, but even those – where the vote different was in the double digits – ended up with the same winner who led.

Let’s not count Gore in 2000, because we really don’t know.

I do recall one House race on Long Island in the 60s that ended in a tie. But has anyone else running for office have been put into office by asking for a recount?

[Whack-a-Mole]

Unfortunately I do not have a cite and this example is at best anecdotal but take it FWIW.

Earlier today on one of the news channels (CNN, MSNBC, FOX…I forget) a pundit mentioned that recounts rarely result in overturning what the official final tally was. He mentioned some race where the losing candidate lost by a bit over 300 votes (out of several hundred thousand) and the recount netted him 28 new votes. Barring overt shenanigans (i.e. someone voted with 3,000 dead people [happened in the past]) a recount is very unlikely to reverse an election. He made it sound like this was common but with these things who knows? He might have been talking out his ass for all I could tell. Like I said, there FWIW…

[Hari_Seldon]

@Whack-a-Mole

Unfortunately I do not have a cite and this example is at best anecdotal but take it FWIW.

Earlier today on one of the news channels (CNN, MSNBC, FOX…I forget) a pundit mentioned that recounts rarely result in overturning what the official final tally was. He mentioned some race where the losing candidate lost by a bit over 300 votes (out of several hundred thousand) and the recount netted him 28 new votes. Barring overt shenanigans (i.e. someone voted with 3,000 dead people [happened in the past]) a recount is very unlikely to reverse an election. He made it sound like this was common but with these things who knows? He might have been talking out his ass for all I could tell. Like I said, there FWIW…

I don’t recall the details, but there was an election for the governor of Washington a few years ago that, IIRC featured two recounts. The first overturned the initial result and I believe that the second confirmed the first recount. Or maybe the second recount reversed the first, I have forgotten. At any rate, the losing candidate sued (I think he made some spurious claim that the recount was illegal or something), but eventually the results were confirmed.

Since mistakes are always made, I could imagine the results of repeated recounts being no more reproducible than coin flips.

[ChordedZither]

@Hari Seldon

I don’t recall the details, but there was an election for the governor of Washington a few years ago

Wikipedia has (at least at the moment) a pretty good summary of the events of the Gregoire election in which a recount did lead to a differnet governor being sworn in than had led when the results were first announced.

[dalej42]

How about the 1988 Buddy Mackay/Connie Mack Florida Senate race? Mackay was projected the winner and was ahead on the vote count, but absentee ballots put Mack over the top.

[Billdo]

@ChordedZither

Wikipedia has (at least at the moment) a pretty good summary of the events of the Gregoire election in which a recount did lead to a differnet governor being sworn in than had led when the results were first announced.

Here’s a more detailed Wikipedia article on the 2004 Washington Gubernatorial Election.

[SmackFu]

This is a cute one, from a 1994 CT House race:

Mr. Gejdenson’s campaign said that out of slightly more than 185,000 votes, he got 470 votes more than Mr. Munster. The Associated Press also gave Mr. Gejdenson the victory, by 5 votes, 79,172 to 79,167. Mr. Munster claimed victory by 362 votes, with 42.6 percent of the vote to 42.4 percent for Mr. Gejdenson.

(The final result was Gejdenson by 21.)