Indiana recount commission finds Trump-backed challenger victorious

Three votes. That's the entire margin the Indiana Recount Commission needed to flip a state Senate primary, and it's worth sitting with how small that number is before anyone declares this a mandate for anything. Paula Copenhaver had lost to Spencer Deery. Now she hasn't. That's not a landslide correction, it's a coin flip that landed the other way once the commission started looking closer.

We don't have a problem with recounts. That's what they're for. If three ballots were miscounted or wrongly excluded, fix it, and if the fix favors the Trump-backed challenger, so be it. But a margin this thin should make everyone a little humble about what actually happened here, including the people cheering loudest. Deery was one of several Republicans who crossed Trump at some point, and it's hard not to notice how fast this became a story about him losing his seat rather than a story about ballot integrity in a west-central Indiana district nobody outside the state had heard of two days ago.

The honest question is whether the process would have gotten this kind of scrutiny if the incumbent had been a Trump loyalist instead. We'd like to think Indiana's recount commission is just doing its job, counting what should have been counted from the start. Three votes either way shouldn't be a referendum on anyone's national loyalties. It should just be arithmetic, done right, and left at that.