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Winner leading throughout a 100 to 80 count

Question

An election ends with 100100 ballots for candidate AA and 8080 for candidate BB. The ballots are shuffled uniformly at random and counted one at a time while a running tally is kept. What is the probability that after every ballot counted, AA has strictly more votes than BB (the empty tally at the start does not count)?

Short answer

19\tfrac19. This is Bertrand's ballot theorem: with n>mn>m votes the probability AA leads throughout is n−mn+m\tfrac{n-m}{n+m}, provable by conditioning on the last ballot and inducting on n+mn+m (or by the reflection principle). Here 20180=19\tfrac{20}{180}=\tfrac19.

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