How 2024 Could Challenge Public Confidence in U.S. Democracy
I’ll set the stage for everyone. It’s 9am on Wednesday, November 6th, and everyone is going to work on the East Coast. Normally, the country would have learned who won the 2024 presidential election the night before. But due to changes in absentee voting procedures, first introduced in 2020 and now used in several key battleground states, Election Week has just begun, and the outcome is still uncertain.
In this situation, three states remain uncalled: Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. It’s been a tight race so far—Harris has won Wisconsin and Michigan, while Trump has taken North Carolina and Georgia. Here's what the electoral map looks like now (though similar scenarios would of course apply if you swapped some of these state results).
So, everyone wakes up to a scenario where winning Pennsylvania means winning the presidency. Even if the exact situation differs slightly, clinching Pennsylvania would make the candidate heavily favored, probably needing just one more win in either Nevada or Arizona.
At this point, Trump holds a 1.5% lead in Pennsylvania, with most votes counted. Nevada and Arizona are still too close to call, with a significant number of ballots uncounted, and drop box or late mail-in votes introduce uncertainty.
Most people will likely assume Trump is on track to win Pennsylvania—and the presidency—given his 100,000-vote lead with only 500,000 ballots left. However, this scenario would likely lead to a Harris victory, complicating the apparent certainty of the outcome.
Starting Wednesday morning, Trump will face a major shift in Pennsylvania. The remaining ballots, which will heavily favor Democrats, could significantly erode his lead. If he’s ahead by less than 3% at 4 a.m., there’s a very real chance he’ll lose the state.
A More Well-Defined Situation
For the worst-case disaster scenario to unfold, several key factors need to align, ranked by importance:
Trump loses the election.
Harris wins Pennsylvania by less than 2%.
Harris secures fewer than 289 electoral votes.
There are less extreme cases where the criteria in Events #2 and #3 aren’t fully met, but this situation is the most likely to spark rigged election claims. Many uninformed viewers could watch in disbelief as Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania slowly shrinks, just like in the last cycle. By ‘uninformed,’ I’m not being pejorative—the vast majority of Americans fit this category because elections are complex and the rules change every cycle. Most Americans aren’t aware that while the red mirage has been fixed in almost every other state, it still exists in Pennsylvania.
Wednesday’s Remaining Votes in Pennsylvania: A Breakdown
I expect about 6% of Pennsylvania's votes (roughly 420,000) to be outstanding after Election Day, with Harris likely to win between 70% and 80% of them. Based on this, Harris is favored to come back if she's trailing by 180,000 votes (around 2.5%) or less by 4 a.m. on Wednesday. There will be three types of votes left on Wednesday morning, all of which are expected to break heavily in her favor:
Provisional Votes: Expect around 60,000 total, with Harris likely to net a margin of 35,000. These votes lean heavily Democratic because most provisional voters are people who requested a mail-in ballot but didn’t use it and then voted in person. While this is allowed, their ballots are counted as provisional and aren’t included in Tuesday night’s count.
Election Day (In-Person) Votes: By Wednesday morning, a few precincts in inner-city Pittsburgh and Philadelphia may still have outstanding votes. Harris is expected to win over 85% of these votes. The number of outstanding votes should be known since county websites will update accurately by Wednesday morning. I estimate about 40 precincts will be outstanding, accounting for around 30,000 votes, with Harris likely netting a margin of approximately 20,000 from these votes.
Absentee (Mail) Votes: The largest portion of uncounted ballots on Wednesday will be mail-in ballots not processed on Tuesday. While some of these may include late-returned ballots (from Monday or Tuesday), most will come from large counties. In Pennsylvania, counties can’t start processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, meaning the larger counties often don’t have time to finish counting their hundreds of thousands of mail-in votes by the end of the day (25 P.S. § 3146.8). Information about how many mail-in ballots remain uncounted, broken down by county, will be difficult to obtain since it’s generally tracked at the county level and may not be publicly available by Wednesday. These ballots will likely favor Harris because they are not only mail-in votes, which typically benefit Democrats, but also from the largest areas that couldn't complete counting on Election Day—counties that tend to lean heavily Democratic.