Under the current description of 'contested' in the description, it is far more likely for a republican loss to result in a contested election, and given the fact that republicans are pretty likely to win this election, this market (and the one I've linked) should be even lower.

Has there been any totally uncontested presidential election in the US post 1996?

@JonathanRay 2004 and 2012 were pretty uncontroversial. But definitely a minority.

@jonsimon What about 2008? Who was contesting that?

@JosephNoonan Oh nevermind, I see the article linked below about the ACORN conspiracy theory. Though I don't think that counts as being contested by any means, since the losing candidate conceded and never tried to challenge the results. Also, I'm not really sure we should interpret the results of polls like that too literally. It seems likely that many of the Republicans who took that poll hadn't even heard of the conspiracy theory and were really just "supporting their team" by saying they thought it was true.

"contested election" often means an election with more than 1 candidate (and an uncontested election can mean an election with only a single candidate.) Please consider renaming poll to clarify that you're interested in a widely disputed election result rather than an election that has more than 1 candidate.

@MichaelZoorob I don't think that's the most common usage? Googling "contested election" appears to return entirely results in keeping with the definition I was using.

Where do you see it used otherwise?

@IsaacKing yeah true: "uncontested election": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontested_election

@IsaacKing some examples where contested refers to competitiveness: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106591298303600206?journalCode=prqa

"Closely contested elections"

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377857.2014.959690

I don't think it's unlikely, but 80% seems too high. At this point, we don't even know who the Republican nominee will be. I think a contested election is only likely to happen if Trump is the nominee and loses again.

The issue is that the resolution criteria are way too broad.

@AaronLehmann They can be interpreted broadly, but I think Isaac may not be going for as broad an interpretation as you think. The only election so far that he's agreed was definitely contested is 2020. Even 2000 he's not sure about.

@JosephNoonan Possibly, but we've seen other elections subject to similar concerns, e.g. Stacey Abrams.

@AaronLehmann I'm open to suggestions for improvement!

Are there any recent elections which you wouldn't consider to be contested? For example, would the 2008 election's allegations of fraud around ACORN count? ("PPP's newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately." -- http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2009/11/acorn.html)

2000 and 2020 would have resolved YES, right? Do you know off the top of your head how you'd have resolved other recent elections?

@StevenK 2020 was certainly a YES. I wasn't politically active during 2000, so I don't know what happened there.

What if people are claiming voter fraud but the outcome isn't close and the voter fraud that people are claiming, even if real, wouldn't have changed the outcome?

@StevenK If they think the outcome of the election was unfair, that still counts, even if their alleged numbers wouldn't have flipped the result. If it's just an academic debate of "this doesn't matter, but I think there was some fraud", that doesn't count.

@IsaacKing If their numbers wouldn't have flipped the result, in what sense would they be claiming the outcome was unfair?

@StevenK They could be bad at math.

@IsaacKing So if a lot of people are claiming ten thousand votes were fraudulent, but they would have needed a million, and they say the election was stolen for that reason, it resolves YES, right?

@StevenK Correct