Votes are still being counted, particularly out west where mail-in ballots are the predominate form of voting.  But we are down to a handful of races that are still too close to call.

There are three things to consider at this point.  The first is how many ballots remain to be processed and where those ballots are.  The second is that Alaska uses ranked-choice voting.  While the U.S. does not have much experience with ranked-choice voting, Australia does.  The Australian experience has taught us is that second and third choices tend to be for the candidate closest to the first choice but there will be some drop off and a minority will go to the “non-similar” candidate.  As such, it is hard for a trailing candidate to close the gap much, and the trailing candidate usually wins only if the original margin is small, there are a significant number of votes for the “also-ran” candidates.  Third, the vote counting machines are very accurate.  There will be some voter errors that are only caught by visual inspection, but recounts rarely change the final count by much.  Closing a 1,000 vote margin in a recount is almost impossible.

Turning to what is still outstanding, depending on the media site that you use, the only outstanding Senate race is Pennsylvania.  The real issue in Pennsylvania is provisional ballots.  The current margin is 18,000.  Senator Bob Casey is receiving about 60% of the vote from provisional ballots so far, and most of the remaining provisional ballots are in areas that favor Senator Casey.  There will be a recount, but, as noted above, it is unlikely that the recount will change the vote total by more than 1,000.  Senator Casey’s chances depend entirely on how many additional provisional ballots are counted. Continue Reading...