Clinton Wins. Trump Refuses to Concede. What Happens Next?

[gratuitous]

12. Let's not be nasty; it doesn't suit us

With all the hand-wringing in the popular media, it's no wonder some folks might get concerned or confused. Let's just proffer an answer, shall we?

The outcome of any election is contingent on the vote count, not on whether one candidate concedes or doesn't concede. So, to that extent, it doesn't matter if Trump concedes victory to Clinton.

However, we have seen in past elections that there is a procedure in place to make a legal challenge to the results of the vote counting. In 2000, the Gore campaign followed the procedure to challenge the results in three Florida counties. The campaign filed its legal challenge just before the deadline (72 hours, if memory serves), which caught the Bush campaign flat-footed as far as filing its own legal challenges in Florida. Unfortunately for the Gore campaign, the legal mechanism for the challenge was controlled by the Republican nominee's brother as governor of Florida, and the Republican nominee's statewide campaign chairman as the secretary of state of Florida.

In short order, the procedure for challenging the results of those three counties was subverted, and the challenge passed out of the legal mechanisms in place prior to the election, and thrown into a hodgepodge of popular sentiment, partisan media commentary, and a concerted effort by Republicans to subvert the mechanisms in place. These forces combined successfully to render the Florida law moot, and refer the controversy to the Supreme Court, where justices appointed by and sympathetic to the family of the Republican nominee ruled in favor of the Republican nominee.

Could it happen again? It's possible, but highly unlikely to happen in 2016. The Republican nominee will not be in a position to monkey with the vote counts or the courts, and his campaign is not savvy enough to mount a legal challenge, let alone a successful one. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 represents "Hair on fire, running around in a panic," the concern level for a successful challenge by Donald Trump to the election results is about -14.