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Election recount

recount of votes, due to close margins or human errors

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ5354560
Source-derived summary

An election recount is a repeat tabulation of votes cast in an election that is used to determine the correctness of an initial count. Recounts will often take place if the initial vote tally during an election is extremely close. Election recounts will often result in changes in contest tallies. Errors can be found or introduced from human factors, such as transcription errors, or machine errors, such as misreads of paper ballots.

Australia

Australian elections use instant-runoff voting and single transferable vote at the federal level to determine representatives for the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively. Tabulating votes for both houses involves automatic recounts known as "fresh scrutiny." For the House, this process occurs the Monday after a general election. The process in the Senate occurs shortly after the election, but only first preferences are recounted. A voter's full preferences for the Senate are not counted until after fresh scrutiny occurs. Candidates for either house may also request recounts, though such a request may be refused by the Electoral Commission.

Similar processes occur at the state and territorial level.

Editorial summary

“Election recount” enters the record as recount of votes, due to close margins or human errors. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Election, recount and votes can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 181-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Election, recount and votes.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Election recount” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Election, recount and votes provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5354560. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Election recount primary sources, Election recount archive and Election research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Election recount” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.