A growing concern regarding the presidential election is when it will be decided, and whether that timing could lead to the losing party or candidate contesting the result.
It’s a valid concern. A surge in mail-in voting is expected, and as New York’s primary showed, it can take a long time for mail-in results to be tallied. If one party votes more frequently by mail than the other, initial vote totals could be misleading, and because the election is run by fifty different states and the District of Columbia, there are really 51 different elections going on. Factor in President Trump’s willingness to ignore facts, and, though this is somewhat less concerning, a belief within corners of the Democratic Party that the 2016 election was stolen by Russia (and that the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia was stolen by Brian Kemp), and the possibility of a mess is high.
The possibility is higher in certain states than others, though. Many states already use substantial mail-in voting. Few states have the potential to actually decide the election. Which states, then, contain the most risk for chaos? And which could be the antidote?
In the table below, we’ve taken the 19 states in FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 Election Forecast in which neither candidate is a 90% or greater favorite, as well as Virginia, which has a 1.4% probability of being the tipping point, though Biden is a 92% favorite to win it. (The tipping point has been defined previously by FiveThirtyEight as “the state that provides the presidential winner his or her 270th electoral vote when all states are rank-ordered by his or her highest to lowest margin of victory.” Since 2000, Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have each played the role.) We did exclude Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, as well as that of Maine, though neither has a 90% or greater favorite, because it’s unlikely either will decide the election. (Nebraska and Maine allocate some of their electoral votes by congressional district, resulting in some elections in which the states’ electoral votes are split between candidates.)
We’ve also included the percentage of 2016 votes that came by mail in each of the states, taken by dividing the number of total ballots returned by total voter turnout, as taken from this report by the Election Assistance Commission.
Finally, we’ve included the vote-by-mail situation in each state for 2020, something that’s subject to change. We’ve broken this down as our source, the New York Times, does: No-Excuse, where anyone can vote by mail without an excuse; Excuse Required, where anyone can vote by mail if they provide a valid excuse (the validity of certain excuses ranges state-to-state, and rest assured, plenty of legal battles are ongoing to determine what is and isn’t a valid excuse); and Ballots Mailed, where the state is mailing ballots to all voters.
| State | Electoral Votes | Biden Win Probability | Trump Win Probability | Tipping Point Probability | 2016 Votes by Mail | 2020 Mail-In Voting |
| PA | 20 | 69% | 31% | 25.1% | 4% | No-Excuse |
| FL | 29 | 60% | 40% | 21.8% | 28% | No-Excuse |
| WI | 10 | 70% | 30% | 9.9% | 5% | No-Excuse |
| MI | 16 | 81% | 19% | 7.2% | 26% | No-Excuse |
| MN | 10 | 73% | 27% | 7.1% | 23% | No-Excuse |
| AZ | 11 | 56% | 44% | 5.5% | 74% | No-Excuse |
| NC | 15 | 47% | 53% | 4.5% | 4% | No-Excuse |
| NV | 6 | 76% | 24% | 2.9% | 7% | Ballots Mailed |
| CO | 9 | 85% | 15% | 2.2% | 92% | Ballots Mailed |
| OH | 18 | 38% | 62% | 2.1% | 22% | No-Excuse |
| GA | 16 | 31% | 69% | 1.8% | 5% | No-Excuse |
| VA | 13 | 92% | 8% | 1.4% | 13% | No-Excuse |
| NH | 4 | 69% | 31% | 1.4% | 9% | No-Excuse |
| TX | 38 | 25% | 75% | 1.1% | 6% | Excuse Required |
| IA | 6 | 30% | 70% | <1% | 41% | No-Excuse |
| ME | 4* | 76% | 24% | <1% | 33% | No-Excuse |
| AK | 3 | 18% | 82% | <1% | 9% | No-Excuse |
| SC | 9 | 12% | 88% | <1% | 23% | Excuse Required |
| MS | 6 | 12% | 88% | <1% | 9% | Excuse Required |
| MT | 3 | 11% | 89% | <1% | 65% | No-Excuse |
You may be surprised by some of this. Arizona, for example, already has very robust vote-by-mail, and potentially high-leverage states such as Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio all at least have experience dealing with large numbers of mail-in ballots, even if the number hasn’t previously exceeded in-person voting.
The most worrisome states are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia. Pennsylvania is rolling out a large expansion in vote-by-mail this year, and it’s a large state (theoretically making it more difficult to run efficiently, given there’s simply more to manage). Though there’s only a one-in-four chance at this point that it turns out to be the tipping point, that’s the highest probability of any one state. Wisconsin has an infamously divisive intrastate political environment, was the tipping point in 2016, and is also attempting to expand mail-in voting. North Carolina isn’t projected to be quite as high-leverage, but it’s a tossup right now, it’s fairly large, and it too is undergoing an expansion in mail-in voting. Georgia had a messy midterm election in 2018 even without a pandemic, and it too is attempting to expand mail-in voting this year.
What could keep us from chaos? The simplest answers are patriotism and a blowout. Patriotism, because in the event of a tight race, we’ll likely need party leaders to put country before party to quell conflict, making statements similar to that of Mitch McConnell regarding last fall’s nearly-contested gubernatorial election in Kentucky. Of course, it was easier and more effective for Mitch McConnell to implicitly discourage Matt Bevin than it would be to discourage Donald Trump, but this is the general idea: Leaders may need to lead. A blowout, of course, would make the results clear perhaps as early as Election Night itself.
One state to hope on, if you’re purely hoping for the least contentiousness possible, is Texas. Texas is competitive (Trump currently stands only a 75% chance of winning it), but it’s unlikely to be the tipping point state (there’s only a one-in-91 chance of Texas providing the decisive blow for a candidate). It’s also currently requiring an excuse to vote by mail, with some prominent legal battles over what constitutes a valid excuse. Texas, like other states, will likely see a surge in votes by mail, but there’s reason to believe that surge may be lesser in Texas than in other states, due to the factors outlined above.
The long and short of this is that if Biden wins Texas, he’ll almost certainly have won the election, and we may know results in Texas earlier than we do in many other competitive states. It’s the second-biggest prize in the country in terms of electoral votes, trailing only California, making it the largest competitive state in the country.
If we can tell on election night that Biden has won Texas, it’ll all be over but the shouting, and the shouting shouldn’t be as intense as it could be otherwise.
