Recounts

A close margin doesn't just make a race dramatic. In most states it triggers, or permits, an official second count, and the rules for who gets one, who can ask, and who pays vary enormously.

How recounts happen, and who pays

Automatic recounts happen because the margin says so: nobody has to ask. When the certified margin falls inside a statutory trigger, most commonly 0.5 percent, the recount proceeds and the government nearly always pays. Twenty states set a margin-based trigger like this, and several others recount automatically only on an exact tie.

Requested recounts put the burden on the losing side. Twenty-seven states make a request the strongest route available to a trailing candidate: fourteen only within a qualifying margin (Texas's 10 percent is the loosest, Utah's quarter-point among the tightest), and thirteen at any margin whatsoever. In a few states the request belongs to voters rather than candidates: any California voter may seek one, and Pennsylvania recounts are petitioned by three voters per district. The two routes overlap; many automatic states also accept requests, so the question in any close race is which path gets there first.

The sharpest exception runs the other way. In seven states (Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina) a candidate cannot request a recount at any margin; outside Pennsylvania's voter petitions, the recount happens automatically or it does not happen at all. Arizona, the state at the center of the country's certification fights, gives a trailing candidate no recount to ask for.

Cost is the variable that decides whether a requested recount actually happens. The common pattern is a deposit or bond refunded if the outcome flips, and many states draw a second, tighter line under which the recount is free: Wisconsin, for example, lets a candidate qualify at 1 percent but pays the bill only inside 0.25 percent. In the any-margin states, a well-funded candidate can simply buy one.

No recount outside the courts. In Illinois, Mississippi, and Tennessee, no recount can change a result without litigation: a candidate who believes the count is wrong goes to court. Illinois's discovery recount, open to a candidate who received at least 95 percent of the winner's vote total, lets them examine up to a quarter of precincts, but by statute it only builds evidence for a contest.

These rules move, and the compilations move slower. Georgia added an automatic manual recount for its top statewide contests in a June 2026 special session, Hawaii rewrote its trigger in both 2024 and 2025, Michigan replaced its old 2,000-vote statewide trigger in 2024, Iowa tightened its margins in 2024, Maryland capped eligibility in 2022, and Arizona quintupled its automatic threshold in 2022. National references still carry the repealed Michigan trigger and Hawaii's superseded threshold; the table below follows the statutes as they stand this cycle, which is why it sometimes disagrees with the sources you may be using.

Every state's rule

The map shows each state's strongest route: an automatic margin trigger, a requested recount with a qualifying margin, a requested recount at any margin, or no recount outside the courts. The table gives the operative rules and who pays, with the statute linked in each row.

Rules shown are for state-level general elections, simplified to the controlling trigger; vote-count alternatives appear where they bind. Kentucky's and Alabama's automatic recounts do not extend to primaries. Where compilations lag a recent amendment, the statute controls: Hawaii's SB 176 (2025) reset its trigger to the lesser of 100 votes or 0.5 percent, and Michigan's 2023–24 overhaul (PA 269, PA 74) replaced the 2,000-vote statewide trigger that the two standard national compilations, from the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Conference of State Legislatures, still list. California adds a third, official-initiated mechanism: the Governor may order a state-funded manual recount of a statewide general decided by the lesser of 1,000 votes or 0.015 percent (Elec. Code 15645).

Do recounts change outcomes?

Almost never, and the record is well quantified. FairVote's survey of statewide recounts counted 6,929 statewide general elections from 2000 through 2023 and just 36 statewide recounts among them (23 automatic, 13 requested): one for every 192 races. Three of the 36 reversed the outcome, one per 2,310 statewide elections, and every reversal started from an initial margin under 0.06 percent; the most recent was Minnesota's 2008 U.S. Senate race. The average recount moved the margin by 551 votes, about 0.03 percent of the vote, and recounts more often widen the leader's margin than narrow it.

The practical lesson for anyone watching a close race: a recount request is not, by itself, evidence that a race is in doubt. More than half of those 36 recounts began outside even a 0.1 percent margin. In 2022, Joey Gilbert paid $190,000 to recount a Nevada primary he had lost by 11 points, and Tina Peters paid $256,000 to recount a Colorado primary she had lost by 14, gaining 13 votes; the loosest requests are often statements rather than strategies.