Hillary Clinton catches up by 23,700 votes in Pennsylvania before recount begins
With a recount effort now underway in the three razor-tight swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, it turns out Hillary Clinton has already moved closer to winning those states than had originally been announced. In the past two weeks Michigan and Wisconsin have both voluntarily revised the size of Donald Trump’s “win” downward by thousands of votes each. And now Pennsylvania has shrunk the size of Trump’s win by tens of thousands of votes.
It’s important to understand that these revisions have been made by the states before the recounts even got underway. These shifts in the vote totals have been based on precincts revising their own numbers, either because they caught errors of their own accord, or in some instances because internet gawkers spotted numerical impossibilities that forced those precincts to check themselves. But the sudden shift in Pennsylvania voting totals is dramatic, in that it wipes out around one-third of Trump’s lead in the state ahead of the recount.
Here’s what happened: according to this USA Today article and several other sources, the vote totals in Pennsylvania had Donald Trump winning by 70,638 votes – a number which was often quoted as a reason for why Hillary Clinton would supposedly have no chance of flipping the state in a recount. But earlier today, the respected Decision Desk HQ posted the newly revised totals from Pennsylvania, which have Donald Trump ahead by just 46,938 votes. That means Trump’s lead in the state has now shrunk by 23,700 votes, based on what it says are newly revised numbers out of Philadelphia.
Again, this massive shift in Hillary Clinton’s direction in Pennsylvania is coming before the recount, based on precincts making their own revisions. It’s notable that all three states in question have now revised their totals sharply in Clinton’s favor before any statewide recounting. Clinton has caught up by more than two thousand votes in Michigan, and caught up by more than five thousand votes in Wisconsin – and now by more than 23,000 votes in Pennsylvania. These were all due to initial errors in Trump’s favor, which have now been corrected. How many more such errors will the recounts uncover?
