Biden's Pennsylvania lead is now big enough to avoid an automatic recount

(Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

published 11 November 2020

President-elect Joe Biden's lead in Pennsylvania has, for now at least, cleared the state's automatic recount threshold.

If one candidate wins an election in Pennsylvania by a 0.5 percent margin or lower, the state will recount the ballots, regardless of whether a request is made. But with new ballots in from Allegheny County, which is home to Pittsburgh, Biden is now up by 0.74 percent. Theoretically, the number could shrink with more tallying underway, but Biden's lead is expected to continue going up, so President Trump or Pennsylvania voters will have to seek out a recount should he desire one.

In terms of raw totals, Biden is now up by 50,000 votes, which means that even if Trump's legal team is successful in getting courts to toss out 10,000 votes received between Election Day and Nov. 6, there's little chance they could actually alter the results unless they find evidence of large-scale voter fraud, which The New York Times reports is nonexistent.

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.