I’ve seen various people on both side claiming that because the vote total in the 2024 presidential race is substantially lower than the total in 2020, there must be something wrong. People on the right assume it’s proof of massive voter fraud by the Democrats in 2020. People on the left assume it’s proof of some sort of skullduggery (exactly what seems to be very unclear) by the Republicans.
The total vote count for 2020 was about 155.5 million for Biden and Trump. For 2024, the total for Trump and Harris is only 140.8 million. There are about 14.7 million votes missing!
The main issue is that there are still many states in which the votes are still being counted. California, for instance, has only counted about 55% of its ballots. If you do the math (which I have done in a spreadsheet), it means there are about 8 million votes in California that have not been counted yet. Now we’re down to only 6.7 million missing votes.
If you perform similar calculations of the outstanding vote for other states, the missing votes almost completely disappear. The projected total for all states is actually about the same as 2020, 150.5 million.
Without a large number of missing votes, there’s no real basis for Democrats to claim skullduggery due to missing votes.
Now, let’s assume for the moment that the Republicans are right, and there was massive voter fraud in 2020 due to the Democrats printing up extra ballots for voters who did not exist. What would we expect to happen in the states where there was fraud? Their vote totals would go down in 2024 due to those fraudulent ballots not being counted. So, in which states did the number of voters drop (in order of largest drop to smallest)?
- New York
- Illinois
- Washington
- Massachusetts
- Mississippi
- New Jersey
- Ohio
- Louisiana
- Virginia
- Florida
- Kansas
- Hawaii
- Connecticut
- Alabama
- West Virginia
- Alaska
- Kentucky
- Arkansas
- Montana
- Missouri
- Iowa
- Nebraska
- Rhode Island
- District of Colombia
- Wyoming
You notice what is missing from that list? Swing states.
Now, to be fair, Minnesota might make that list once all the votes are actually counted. It’s currently projected to gain 972 votes over 2020, but it might end up with fewer.
So, where are the swing states? They’re in this list of states that gained votes (in order of largest gain to smallest, swing states in bold):
- California
- Georgia
- Arizona
- Colorado
- North Carolina
- Wisconsin
- Texas
- Nevada
- Michigan
- Maryland
- Utah
- South Carolina
- Pennsylvania
- Tennessee
- New Hampshire
- Idaho
- Oregon
- Oklahoma
- Maine
- Delaware
- South Dakota
- North Dakota
- New Mexico
- Indiana
- Vermont
- Minnesota
So, with the possible exception of Minnesota, the swing states tended to have rather large increases in their vote totals, which seems incompatible with the idea that there were large numbers of manufactured votes in those states in 2020.