Explaining Election Day: How recounts work
From the Explaining Election Day: Understanding the processes from voting to declaring winners series
There will be races this year that are so close that election officials will have to recount the votes to make sure they have the correct outcome, but a recount rarely changes the winner. Since the most famous recount of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, there have been 36 statewide elections that went to recount in general elections, only three of them changed the outcome. All three of those races were decided by hundreds of votes, not thousands.