Both Sides Distort Incomplete Vote Counts to Falsely Suggest Election Fraud

Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

Ballots were still being counted in the days following the 2024 election, but a claim that there was a suspicious gap of 15 million to 20 million votes as compared with the 2020 election has been circulating on social media. There is no such large gap — states were still counting their ballots — and even if there are fewer votes for the Democratic candidate than there were four years ago, that doesn’t prove fraud.

Full Story

President-elect Donald Trump has a history of making false claims about voter fraud. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump falsely blamed it on fraud, and he and his supporters have continued to spread those claims for years.

When returns in 2024 began to clearly favor Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, though, posts making claims about voter fraud slowed, and accounts that had previously boosted the narrative that U.S. elections were beset with fraud quickly embraced the outcome.

But social media posts are now using incomplete vote counts for the 2024 election to continue to claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, while other, left-leaning accounts are posting similarly inaccurate claims suggesting that “missing” votes indicate fraud in this election.

Early in the morning following Election Day, conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted on X, “Weird how +20 million Democrats just disappeared in a single election from 2020 to 2024[.] Super duper strange man[.] Joe Biden got 81 million votes Kamala got 60? Very Sus.”

Four hours later, at about 8 a.m. on Nov. 6, ZeroHedge — a website that has a history of spreading misinformation — posted on X a graph that appeared to show about 15 million more votes for the Democratic candidate in 2020 compared with the 2012, 2016 and 2024 elections.

Another popular account called “DC_Draino,” which is run by the conservative influencer Rogan O’Handley, posted the graph on Instagram later that day with this comment: “Boy did they pull a LOT of shenanigans in 2020. Thankfully we cleaned up our elections just enough to stop the steal in 2024.”

O’Handley later followed up on that claim and posted side-by-side maps of California’s results by county in 2020 and 2024, suggesting that the maps indicated fraud, writing, “I think we found where some of those 16 million mystery Biden ballots were being laundered.”

Those on the other side of the political spectrum appear to be circulating a different fraud claim, saying things such as, “people that voted by mail are doing the Track My Vote thing, all 20 million that voted D that have reported so far say they were told they didn’t vote. Including my cousin and sister. Two different states. 20 million missing Democrat votes and Kamala is going to call trump at 4 pm today to concede?”

But, really, there’s nothing nefarious going on. It’s just that not all of the ballots have been counted yet.

In 2012, Barack Obama won both the electoral and popular votes, receiving 66 million votes to Mitt Romney’s 61 million.

In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, receiving 63 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 66 million.

In 2020, which had record-high turnout, Biden won both the electoral and popular votes, receiving 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million.

In 2024, not all the ballots have been counted yet.

The morning after the election, Johnson had said that Harris got 60 million votes. But the total was 72.4 million for Harris as of the morning of Nov. 13, according to the Associated Press’ tally, which showed that all but two states have yet to count all of the ballots.

California, which O’Handley highlighted in his Nov. 7 post, still had millions of votes left to count on that day. On Nov. 8, as of about 5 p.m., the California secretary of state’s office estimated there were about 5 million ballots left to process. There were still an estimated 2.1 million votes uncounted in California, as of Nov. 13.

California, where some races for the House of Representatives haven’t yet been called a week after the election, takes a long time to count ballots. The New York Times explained in a Nov. 11 story that the state deals with a lot of mail-in ballots, which are sent to every active, registered voter and take longer to process than in-person votes. California also accepts ballots up to seven days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

It’s also worth noting that Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement on Nov. 6 that in this election “we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

“Now,” she said, “election officials will carry out their duty to certify the results and ensure that every eligible vote has been counted as cast.”

After all the votes have been counted, it’s possible that more ballots were cast in 2020, and it’s likely that Harris will garner fewer votes than President Joe Biden did four years ago. But that’s not evidence of fraud; in fact, it’s happened before. In 1988, George H.W. Bush received nearly 49 million votes, which was 5.6 million fewer than his Republican predecessor, Ronald Reagan, won in 1984. And in 2012 Barack Obama brought in about 66 million votes, which was 3.6 million fewer than he received in 2008.

So, the bottom line is that comparing early vote counts to 2020 vote totals doesn’t prove that there was any kind of fraud in that election or in this one.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Meta to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Meta has no control over our editorial content.