A voting gap between 2020 and 2024 is fueling false election narratives.
The 2020 election was marked by debunked claims of voter fraud from now-President-Elect Trump and his allies — only this time around, denials and accusations are coming from both sides of the aisle.
Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, left and right-leaning users on social media began posting about millions of “missing” Democratic ballots with two very conflicting messages.
While Republicans revived Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Democrats questioned how Vice President Kamala Harris received so many fewer votes overall than President Biden did four years ago. Naturally, both these narratives raise major questions, so we looked into the online chatter to separate fact from fiction.
What are social media users saying about 20 million “missing” Democratic votes?
Posts about this apparent voting gap first gained steam on X on Nov. 5, according to research by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which tracks rumors about election administration.
The hashtags #DoNotConcedeKamala and #Trumpcheat started trending among liberals, and the next day, there were more than 30,000 mentions of the hashtag along with the words “rigged,” “fraud,” or “stolen,” according to NewsGuard.
“If anyone could fund a massive election fraud scheme, it’s Elon Musk,” SiriusXM Progress Channel Host Dean Obeidallah wrote on Instagram Threads, referring to Musk’s close ties to Trump as one of his biggest backers.
Soon, pro-Trump influencers began sharing their own narrative by reviving Trump’s 2020 claims of election fraud, which gained a far wider reach: Right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza posted on X that the shortfall in Democratic votes “never existed,” a post which racked up more than 4 million views. A similar post from YouTuber Benny Johnson was viewed over 22 million times.
There are a couple of theories about why this false narrative spread more rapidly among conservatives. For starters, this sort of narrative isn’t as widely embraced among Democrats — and these claims dropped off as soon as Harris conceded the race, something Trump refused to do in 2020. “We must respect the results of this election,” she said in her concession speech on Wednesday.
But voting data analyst Ken Block predicts that this may not be the last we hear of these fraud claims. (And Block knows a thing or two about the issue, having debunked Trump’s claims of fraud in 2020.) “Harris can win the popular vote once the counting is done,” he tells us. “If that happens, I expect the calls of voter fraud to rise dramatically.”
Was there election fraud in 2024?
While officials dealt with some complications on Election Day, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded there was “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
So, how do you explain the apparent shortfall of votes? In 2020, Biden received around 81 million votes, compared to President Harris’ total of roughly 69 million, according to the Associated Press. And this gap is expected to narrow as more votes are counted in left-leaning states like Washington and Oregon.
However, there are a couple of explanations behind the gap between Harris and Biden’s total. The most obvious one is that votes are still being counted, especially in more-populous states like California.
“California takes a while to count their votes,” Biden’s former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told Katie for an upcoming episode of Next Question (out on Nov. 14). “There are laws in states that trigger recounts if it is too close. But I think it’s important for people to understand that the margins of victory were quite large in a lot of places, definitive, and fewer people that turned out for Kamala Harris than turned out for Joe Biden.”
Unfortunately, we still have a ways to go before the votes are all in. Citing data from The New York Times, Block estimates that 148.1 million votes have been counted so far, representing an estimated 94.6 percent of all votes cast. This means that there are nearly 8.5 million remaining votes. “It is too early to discuss 2024 versus 2020 total vote counts, as the 2024 counts are still incomplete,” he says.
Other factors include voter turnout, which varies from election to election. For instance, a record 160 million people voted in 2020, and though this election’s turnout will likely be close to that number, Trump made gains across the country, including in Democratic strongholds. This means Harris that will likely fall short of Biden’s total votes in the end — which may also mean that these claims of fraud will circulate for a while.
