It is almost a month after the election, and by now everyone knows that Donald Trump has been elected as the next president of the United States. What you might not know is that this could change.
In the last week, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have all decided to do a voter recount after nearly a month of petitioning by Jill Stein to contest the results. In the election, the presidency came down to these three very important, traditionally Democratic states. Should their recounts change or negate their electoral college votes, we may not have Donald Trump being sworn in as president in January, but instead Hillary Clinton.
Recounts began Thursday in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but may not be completed due to a sudden intense effort from Trump himself to stop voter recounts from occurring in these three states. Trump has filed a lawsuit against all three states. In one suit, Trump claims that “If the Bureau of Elections moves forward with the recount, it will waste the State’s scarce resources, create a logistical nightmare for counties across the State, and assure that Michigan’s Electoral College voters will not be counted.”
While the lawsuits have done nothing thus far to halt the progress of recounting the votes, they promise to make the process more complicated, which is bad for the states, as they are required by law to have their final votes in by December 19 when the electoral college offically meets to cast their votes. If they cannot get their votes in on time due to the recount, then that state’s electoral votes will not count towards the 270 that a candidate needs to win. For this to happen, only one prescient has to be in the middle of a recount, which could work in Clinton’s favor as Pennsylvania has to decide prescient by prescient, and not as a state to recount the votes.
Currently, the vote count shows that in Michigan, Trump is ahead by 10,704 votes. In Pennsylvania, Trump is ahead by 70,638 votes. And in Wisconsin, Trump is ahead by 22,177 votes. Though these seem like large numbers, recounts often show a discrepancy of thousands of votes, so it is possible that the recounts could flip Michigan or Wisconsin. However, it is nearly impossible that Pennsylvania will show a discrepancy of more than 70,000 votes. Because Donald Trump currently has 306 electoral votes, he would have to lose all three states by either a voter recount flipping the states or causing the state’s votes not to count and to be put under 270 (the number needed to win the election).
Pennsylvania began to recount their votes on Friday in 75 of their 1700 precincts and after Trump’s lawsuit failed in Michigan on Friday, they are set to begin recounts this coming Wednesday, December 7.
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