One-vote margins and coin flips: Putting the 2020 election count in context

One-vote margins and coin flips: Putting the 2020 election count in context

By Trevor Getz, OER Project Team
San Francisco, USA

So that was a pretty close election, eh?

Or… was it?

As of the writing of this blog post, Joe Biden has 75,641,852 votes, while Donald Trump has received 71,252,741. That’s a difference of 3.0%, with the gap expected to grow. Even if we focus on the Electoral College, which is what really counts in American presidential elections, we’re looking at a projected total of 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump, which actually represents a much larger margin of victory.

This Electoral College divide doesn’t hold a candle to the 1876 contest between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, which came down to 185 votes for Hayes and 184 for Tilden. The recorded popular vote difference was slightly larger, at 4,300,590 to 4,034,142. Even that’s nothing compared to the drama of the 1824 presidential election, in which John Quincy Adams tied with Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives, where Adams won. Adding significance to this event, both candidates were actually members of the same party (Democratic-Republican), which split soon after, giving us our modern two-party system.

But the US doesn’t really stand out in terms of close contests. You wanna hear about some really close elections in world history?

Let me take you back to 1961, to the British Protectorate of Zanzibar, in East Africa. By this date, Britain was slowly waking up to the realization that its African colonies (and protectorates) would eventually gain independence, and so-called “legislative councils”—made up of mainly local representatives—were clawing back some power from the colonial administrators. Africans were forming Political parties, often representing different visions of an independent future. In Zanzibar, politics was complicated by the diversity of the cosmopolitan population. There was the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), which mainly represented elements of the Black African population, and which had a Marxist political bent. Their principal rivals were the Zanzibar Nationalist Party (ZNP), which was politically less radical, and which was supported by the Arab population as well as many urban Africans. Many voters knew this election would decide which party would lead Zanzibar to independence, and thus which vision of Zanzibar would dominate its early years. In the January 1961 election, the ASP won 10 of the 22 Legislative Council seats. The ZNP won nine. But most dramatically, one of those seats, that of the Chake-Chake District, was won by a single vote—1,538 to 1,537. Smaller parties won the other three seats. The closeness of this election led to a new election in June, but this just made things worse as each of the two major parties then won 10 seats. In the years that followed, this dramatic divide would lead to civil conflict in the newly independent state.

Think that’s close? The 2013 mayoral election in the Philippine Municipality of San Teodoro was divided by a coin flip. This was a general midterm election during the presidency of Benigno Aquino III, and the big prizes were about half the national Senate and all of the seats in the House of Representatives. President Aquino’s Liberal Party faced a host of challengers, including the massive United Nationalist Alliance and the Nationalist Party. In San Teodoro, Liberal Party member Marvic Feraren faced Nationalist Salvador Py, and in that race each candidate received 3,236 votes. The law provided that in the case of a tie, the mayorship would be decided by a unique coin-toss game. The two candidates each flipped a coin five times to see who would get the most heads. The first game ended in a tie, with Feraren and Py each getting two heads and three tails. They flipped again, Feraren won, and he was duly sworn in as mayor. Py, of course, was not happy. He vowed to pursue legal options, but in the end was unable to overturn the legal result of the coin toss.

The Australian electorate of Nunawading almost had a similar situation in 1985. Labor Party candidate Bob Ives and Liberal Party candidate Rosemary Varty each received 54,821 votes in an election for the Victoria Legislative Council. The law required the officer administering the election to cast the final vote, and she drew names from a box to determine the winner. Ives’s name was drawn. In this case, however, Varty managed to dispute 44 votes that had been incorrectly excluded, and a second election was held, which Varty won.

In fact there are numerous examples of elections so close they make the 2020 US election feel like a pretty decisive win. Perhaps our favorite from the list is a slightly NSFW story about a 2013 election to the State Legislature of Carinthia in Austria. We’re not going to get ourselves in trouble and describe it here, but if your interest is piqued, you can learn more here. (You’ve been warned!)

These examples of elections through the ages are a drop in the bucket. Let’s just say that the 2020 United States presidential election will not go down as one of the closest elections in world history!


About the author: Trevor Getz is professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has written or edited 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Cover image: A view from Times Square is seen on the 2020 United States Presidential Election night in New York City, United States on November 3, 2020. © Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

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