How we know Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential race
Since Election Day, we’ve fact-checked dozens of posts that misconstrue small errors in the ballot-counting process as evidence of a nationwide, Democrat-led voter fraud scheme to deny Donald Trump re-election. Both federal and local officials have said that’s not the case, but the claims have still proliferated on social media and among politicians and pundits.
Those claims are wrong — Joe Biden is the clear winner of the presidential race. Trump does not have a path to victory. This is not a matter of partisanship. It's a matter of facts.
PolitiFact crunched the numbers, looked at margins in key battleground states and looked into whether recounts and lawsuits could affect the election outcome.
How do we know Biden won?
He won more votes. Here’s how we know that:
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Each state is responsible for administering their own elections. In many states, this responsibility lies with the secretary of state, although counties and towns do most of the actual administration.
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After voters cast their ballots, local election workers tabulate them at ballot-counting centers, where Republican, Democratic and nonpartisan challengers observe the process. Election officials then report vote tallies publicly on their websites. (Here are the vote counts for battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.)
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The Associated Press gathers those results directly from state or county officials and websites. Those results are then double-checked to make sure they’re accurate.
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Statisticians monitor those vote totals and see if either candidate has a clear path to victory. Once it’s clear that one candidate has enough votes to carry a state, news outlets will make a projection.
Those projections are not official results (more on that later), but they’re based on real votes reported by state election officials all over the country.
Biden needed 270 electoral votes to win the presidency and, based on vote counts reported by each state, he has passed that threshold.
How big is Biden’s margin of victory?
It’s not huge, but it’s enough to put him in the White House.
For example, in Pennsylvania — the only swing state that Biden needs to win the presidency — unofficial results indicate that the former vice president was ahead of Trump by nearly 60,000 votes last week. Biden also leads in other battleground states, including Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, by tens of thousands of votes.
Election officials are still counting votes in some states, but most of the results are in and the margins are wide enough that Trump will not be able to make up the difference. Plus, most of the votes that are left to be counted are mail-in ballots, which Democrats tended to use more than Republicans.
What is the likelihood that recounts will make a meaningful impact on the presidential election?
Past recounts have resulted in a change of only hundreds of votes. For example, the most recent election recount in Wisconsin, in 2016, shifted the margin by 571 votes.
Biden finished ahead in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes and led in Georgia by about 14,000 votes last week. It’s improbable that a recount would dramatically shrink those margins, much less hand the states to Trump.
Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, a Republican political consultant and lobbyist, said recounts will not overturn the election result.
"There are only three statewide contests in the past half-century in which recounts changed the outcome: the 1974 New Hampshire Senate race, the 2004 Washington governor’s contest, and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election," Rove wrote. "The candidates in these races were separated, respectively, by 355, 261 and 215 votes after Election Day."
How does this compare to the Florida recount in 2000?
It doesn’t compare at all.
The 2000 presidential election came down to one state, and the margin between George W. Bush and Al Gore was 537 votes. In the 2020 race, Trump would have to flip tens of thousands of votes in multiple states to have any shot at winning.
The controversy in Florida was not really about a recount, as most think it was, said Robert Speel, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University who teaches the history of American elections. It was about ballots that weren’t counted in the first place.
"The punch card machines had registered no votes at all for about 170,000 Floridians, so Al Gore was requesting hand counts of those ballots. It’s very different from what’s happening now," he said. "There’s not hundreds of thousands of missing votes like in 2000."
Could Trump’s legal challenges affect the election outcome?
So far, there are no signs the Republicans will succeed in their efforts with the courts; Biden’s margins of victory are simply too large.
In some cases, Republicans sought to stop the counting of ballots or certification of results. In other cases, Republicans asked a judge to order changes related to ballot counting procedures, to review certain ballots or to demand closer access for observers.
While some cases remain pending, the counting of ballots continued.
Overall, the strategies are unlikely to erode the margins of Biden’s victory. Election experts say that they have seen no evidence of anything that would lead to the outcome of the presidential race being reversed and that Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
Is there any evidence that votes were miscast or miscounted?
No.
In a Nov. 12 statement, a committee made up of U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials and its election partners said this election was "the most secure in American history."
"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the agency wrote. "While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should, too."
When will the election results be final?
States have until Dec. 8 to certify their vote counts, but the Electoral College results won’t be finalized until Jan. 6.
Once states certify their results, electors are appointed. Electors are determined by the popular vote in each state. Political parties in each state choose potential electors before the general election, and voters choose them by voting for a presidential candidate.
State electors will meet Dec. 14 and cast their votes for president. Those results then make their way to Congress, which will count electoral votes in a joint session at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6. Ultimately, the vice president declares a winner, at which point the election is officially decided.
— Daniel Funke and Samantha Putterman
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