The hundreds of pre-Election Day disputes, many of which were initiated or pursued by the major political parties and their presidential candidates, were all over the map in their approaches, from disputing eligibility of candidates to appear on the ballot to disputing implementation of certain kinds of voting procedures.

But the challenges after Election Day look very different and are much narrower for a variety of reasons.

First, of course, is the margin. If a candidate wins by a wide margin in a state, there’s futility in the challenge (or less value in the challenge if you’re the winning candidate!). That sharply narrows the places for disputes.

Second is looking at the types of legal challenges to ballots. And this is because once you’ve scrambled the egg, it’s impossible to unscramble. That is, once ballots have been cast, commingled, and counted, it’s impossible to figure out which ballots should be excluded.

That’s also due in part to a reliance interest—that is, if voters entered the polling place on Election Day expecting the rules to look one way, then all their votes should be counted together.

Now, there are some batches of ballots that might be in dispute—subject, of course, to the first caveat of margin. Those include:

Provisional ballots, those cast that have some defect like a lack of identification or sufficient proof of residence. They might be cured in some limited period of time after Election Day, or they might be counted if some contingent event happens (e.g., if someone requested an absentee ballot but failed to surrender it at the polls, a state might count the provisional ballot if that absentee ballot never arrives to be counted).

“Discovered ballots,” those “found” after Election Day—it might be negligence or error that failed to include a batch, or it might be claims of fraud. If those weren’t originally included in an original count, there might be disputes over whether they should be counted if there are chain of custody concerns.

Late-arriving ballots, those postmarked on or before Election Day but counted within a set period of time after Election Day. Some states authorize this by statute, others have had judicial decisions, consent decrees, or administrative rules extending the deadline.

A subset of late-arriving ballots are segregated ballots in states like Pennsylvania and Minnesota, already subject to judicial challenge as a kind of late-arriving ballot.

Rejected absentee ballots, due to, for instance, disputes about signature matches.

Ballots not recognized as votes, either by tabulation machines, or that were otherwise manually counted.

Physically damaged ballots that were duplicated by election officials—in some states, if a ballot is torn, smudged, or damaged in some other way, an election official might “duplicate” the ballot so it can be read by the machine.

UPDATE: Special thanks to Professor Michael Morley for supplementing these categories!

Much of these batches, including most provisional ballots and many late-arriving ballots, are mostly beyond material legal dispute. That is, they are authorized under state statute, and challenges about their application would apply only to narrow subsets of ballots.

Or, in recount, one could fight tooth and nail in manual tally about whether to count or exclude this ballot or that based on this marking or that. Again, it’s very piecemeal and narrow.

The most extreme outcome would be to invalidate an election because of uncertainty over the winner. But that extreme outcome comes usually from evidence of pervasive fraud or some systemic question about the election, which requires extensive evidence.

In short, once the egg is scrambled—once a bunch of ballots are commingled and counted under existing rules without a sound hook to challenge those decisions (or under lawsuits that refused to prohibit those decisions)—those ballots are pretty much locked in absent something pretty egregious like pervasive fraud or unusual recount procedures. (It might be that some machines were operating in error, too, but there are a thousand uncertainties….) As for the remaining batches of ballots, they are a fixed universe with fewer viable challenges and far fewer at a systemic level.

We’ll see what litigation (or threats of litigation!) look like in the days ahead, and what kinds of additional precision this quick blog post might have as potential challenges arise. But it’s a portrait of how significantly different these challenges might be—at least, challenges filed in court.