Joe Biden is now winning the 2020 election by the greatest popular vote margin since 2008. Across the three Rust Belt states where Trump won by just 79,646 votes in 2016, Biden currently leads by 213,147. Biden also flipped Georgia blue with a win that has him up by 14,111 votes. That number puts Georgia far outside the range of past recounts, and makes it 235 times the margin when Al Franken successfully won a Minnesota Senate seat in the 2008 election after a recount moved the needle just 60 votes.
So naturally, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has announced there is going to be a recount in Georgia. Not a machine recount to confirm the total of ballots by county, or a limited recount to investigate specific areas, but a full hand recount of the entire state. As Raffensperger says, “it will be an audit, a recount, and a recanvas all at once.” It will also be lengthy, costly, and absolutely, positively pointless. It was also not required, since Georgia law doesn’t call for automatic recounts, much less the kind of super-recount Raffensperger described. Wasting millions of Georgia taxpayer dollars on a meaningless example of how state officials are bowing to Republican leaders in Washington sounds like the perfect event to hold right before Georgia becomes the critical Senate runoff.
To make things even better, in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way, Raffensperger might have tried to spare Georgia taxpayers from bearing the full cost of the recount. That’s because not only is there no automatic recount in Georgia law, there is nothing in the law that says the state picks up all the costs. Raffensperger could easily have done what Wisconsin did: offer to do a recount at the request of the Trump campaign, if the Trump campaign were willing to cover the costs. He might even have offered to split the costs in order to reduce the burden on both sides. But nope, he just dove right in and gave Trump an extra large, extra deluxe freebie.
It might be worth noting that while there was a recount in Wisconsin in 2016, that recount request didn’t come from Hillary Clinton. Clinton called the Trump campaign literally seconds after the AP called the race at 2:30 in the morning to offer her concession and promise to help with the transition in any way she could. The reason there was a recount in Wisconsin was because it was requested by … Jill Stein.
Stein fundraised off her own donors, and off heartbroken Clinton supporters, with the promise that donations to her would go toward conducting recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Despite collecting an unknown amount of money, Stein’s requests for a recount in Michigan and Pennsylvania were denied. However, that Wisconsin recount did change the numbers … it found 131 more votes for Trump, which isn’t quite as much as a 2011 recount of a state supreme court race that changed the outcome by 312 votes. But it’s much larger than the last recount in Georgia, also over a judicial race, where the results were changed by just 15 votes. In fact, the margin in Georgia is more than 10 times the largest change ever discovered by a state-level recount.
What Raffensperger is doing isn’t coming from any real concern that the outcome of the election might be inaccurate. Trump is not going to find a tenth as many votes as he needs to alter the recount, no matter how many hands sort the votes. This recount is all about Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp surrendering to the pressure from Republicans in Washington who have been whipping their state with claims of fraud.
So the Georgia recount will be costly, pointless, embarrassing, and driven by state officials wilting under attacks they know are false. It will require hiring thousands of counters, paying out millions of dollars, and is unlikely to be complete before someone is forced to dust off a little Supreme Court decision called Bush v. Gore. It’s going to be perfect. Just perfect.