Turnout in the 2024 US election is on track to be slightly lower than four years ago, but the vote totals are not evidence of fraud affecting President Joe Biden’s previous victory. The latest figures cited online are incomplete — and no audits, courts or recounts found evidence of widespread malfeasance in 2020.
“I really didn’t need more evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, but where did 15 MILLION votes disappear to?” says a November 6, 2024 X post.
The post includes a graph that purports to show voter turnout for Democrats and Republicans in US presidential elections between 2012 and 2024. Democratic participation in the 2020 race appears to be significantly higher than in the other three contests.
The graphic and similar claims of 2020 election interference spread on Facebook, X, Threads and Instagram in multiple languages, including Spanish and French.
Screenshot of a X post taken November 13, 2024
Screenshot of an Instagram post taken November 13, 2024
The earliest version of the chart appears to have been posted November 6 by Zero Hedge, a conspiratorial website that AFP has fact-checked numerous times.
The graphic shows more than 65 million votes for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to President-elect Donald Trump in 2024, compared to 81 million for Biden in 2020.
The approximate figures for the 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections appear to be accurate, according to data from the nonpartisan poll-tracking website 270toWin (archived here). However, it includes an incomplete vote tally for 2024 — and the accompanying claims of fraud are baseless.
“It is very premature to compare 2024 turnout to 2020 turnout at this point, we won’t know 2024 turnout until all states have finished certifying their votes,” said Michael Alvarez, a professor of computational political and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology (archived here), in a November 7 email.
Counts not finished
Harris had nearly 73 million votes as of 2000 GMT on November 14, according to the Associated Press (AP), which provides election returns to many US media outlets (archived here).
However, the count is still not final; California had only counted about 87 percent of ballots, and many other US states were at 90 to 99 percent.
California, the most populous state, takes longer than others because of its size and number of voters, mail-in ballots, provisional votes and same-day registration. There were still more than 1.6 million uncounted ballots as of 2000 GMT on November 14 (archived here).
Robyn BeckAFP
Robyn Beck / AFP
Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (archived here), said many of the remaining votes from historically Democratic California would likely be for Harris.
“The Harris popular vote share will go up as things are finalized over the next month (as was the case for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020),” Berinsky said in a November 8 email.
Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University (archived here), added that voter turnout can fluctuate between elections.
Data from the University of Florida’s Election Lab show about 66 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2020 election — far more than in 2012 and 2016 (archived here). The US Census Bureau has published similar estimates (archived here).
Screenshot of University of Florida Election Lab data taken November 13, 2024
As of November 13, the Election Lab estimated voter turnout for 2024 was around 63.5 percent — lower than 2020 but higher than 2012 or 2016 (archived here).
No evidence of 2020 fraud
The Electoral College certified Biden’s 2020 victory, despite claims of irregularities affecting the race — often egged on by Trump himself (archived here).
Baseless claims that the 2020 election was ridden with fraud and stolen from Trump still resurface online, despite being thoroughly refuted by government officials, courts and audits (archived here, here and here).
“There was no fraud established for 2020,” Skocpol said in a November 7 email.
As for the lower turnout among Democrats in 2024, Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University (archived here), said the trend could be attributed to general dissatisfaction with the incumbent party rather than vote-rigging in a previous election.
“Some people switched from Democratic to Republican, some other Democrats did not turn out to vote and some additional Republicans came to the polls,” Gelman said in a November 7 email.
Read more of AFP’s reporting on misinformation about the 2024 US presidential election here.
