Social media has been awash with claims of ‘missing’ votes after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory - but there’s a simple explaination for the apparent gulf between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ vote tallies
Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump
was elected the 47th president of the United States, social media users began pushing two conflicting narratives to suggest election fraud.
One revived false claims by Trump that the 2020 vote was stolen from him and the other questioned how Vice President Kamala Harris could have received so many fewer votes in 2024 than President Joe Biden in 2020.
Both narratives hinge on a supposed 20 million vote gap between Harris and Biden.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: President Joe Biden won approximately 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris earned in the 2024 race, proving either that Trump has cheated his way to a second term or that there was widespread fraud four years ago.
THE FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison with previous races would not be accurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote have reported no significant issues with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been debunked countless times.
“As we have said repeatedly, our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people,” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly
said in a statement.
“This is what we saw [on Tuesday] in the peaceful and secure exercise of democracy. Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”
Multiple Pennsylvania officials, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, said that they had not seen any signs of cheating and called the election secure after Trump said in a
Truth Social post Tuesday that there was “a lot of talking about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.”
And yet, posts circulated online claiming otherwise, receiving hundreds of thousands of likes and shares.
“20 MILLION VOTES WERENT COUNTED,” reads one X post. “I KNEW IT TRUMP CHEATED.”
Another X post, which shared a bar graph of presidential election results from 2012-2024, states: “If these numbers are accurate, this is indicative of a stolen 2020 election. 20 million votes just disappeared. In other words there were potentially 20 million fraudulent votes last cycle. That’s an insane number.”
The Democratic candidates in
2012 and
2016 both won nearly 66 million votes, a bit less than Harris’ current count.
Harris had won
about 67 million votes as of Wednesday afternoon, compared to the
approximately 81 million Biden garnered in 2020 — a difference of about 14 million. But that gap is decreasing as the vote count continues. No state has counted 100% of its ballots yet.
Social media has been awash with claims of ‘missing’ votes after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory - but there’s a simple explaination for the apparent gulf between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ vote tallies
www.independent.co.uk