Fact-check: Did 20 million Democratic votes ‘disappear’?

When Donald Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020, many Republicans — Trump included — made unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud. Now, following Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, some of her liberal supporters are taking to social media to allege fraud.

“I spent my early career in computer security for the Navy and NSA,” wrote Wayne Madsen, a writer known to spread conspiracy theories, in a November 6 Threads post. “I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked just like happened a few weeks ago in the Republic of Georgia. Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, [Steve] Bannon, [Michael] Flynn and [Vladimir] Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Another poster discouraged Harris from conceding the election, similarly alleging election discrepancies. “20 million less votes than last election? 14 million more votes for Trump over Harris? Trump and those around him were more than confident Trump would win,” read the November 6 Threads post. “We need an investigation. This election was stolen.”

The Facebook, Instagram and Threads posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.

These claims are inaccurate. There have been no credible allegations of election fraud or evidence of votes that disappeared during the 2024 election.

On November 6, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly said that election officials are still counting votes and reported no incidents of compromised election security.

“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,” Easterly said. “This is what we saw yesterday 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.”

Similarly, Ishan Mehta, director of media and democracy at Common Cause, a public advocacy group, said the 2024 election was safe, secure and “pretty smooth”.

He said Common Cause has thousands of volunteers in all 50 states who monitored the election at polling sites and vote-counting centres. The group also has a team that monitors chatter about voting on social media.

Because of that, Common Cause typically knows when election issues arise — and those incidents typically end up being “some sort of machine or human error that we have systems to correct”, Mehta said.

Such incidents do not mean “the election was hacked, or there has been any sort of nefarious activity to change any Americans’ actual votes”, he said.

“There is no evidence that any votes disappeared,” or of other fraudulent activity during the 2024 election, Mehta said. He also said he knew of no evidence of attempts — let alone successful efforts — to “hack” or “steal” the election.

Even if such attempts occurred, they would fail, experts said.

“There is no one ‘hack’ to change the outcome of an election or to change vote totals,” Mehta said. “Each state has its own independent, non-connected systems,” and election workers are trained to run elections and fix any issues that arise and take that responsibility seriously.

2024 voter turnout is still being calculated, but fluctuations don’t signal fraud, experts say

Experts repeatedly told PolitiFact that voter turnout ebbs and flows from election to election.

Paul Gronke, a Reed College political science professor, said factors such as enthusiasm for the candidates, campaign efforts and an election’s competitiveness all affect voter turnout.

“If the final results show that 20 million fewer votes were cast for the Democratic candidate for President in 2024 than in 2020, what that indicates is that 20 million voters made a decision not to cast a ballot, either not turn out at all, or not check the top contest,” Gronke said. “That’s the end of the story.”

Election denial is antidemocratic, said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with election officials from both political parties to build trust in elections.

“We will know the full turnout once the votes are certified by the states, in a few weeks,” he told PolitiFact. Becker pointed to data from the University of Florida: “We’re on track to have the second highest turnout in votes in US history, and the second- or third-highest turnout in percentage since 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote,” he said.

As of 4pm on November 7, Trump received 72.8 million votes and Harris received about 68 million votes. In 2020, Trump received 74.2 million votes and President Joe Biden received 81.2 million.

“Election officials, election monitors, election lawyers, partisan observers, non-partisan observers, and election science experts like myself pay very close attention to elections at every level,” Gronke said. “There have been reports of a few glitches in scattered locations. There is no evidence at all of anything fraudulent, certainly not on the kind of scale being suggested here.”

Our ruling

Threads posts alleged election fraud and said 20 million Democratic votes “disappeared” in 2024.

Election experts and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reported no evidence of disappearing votes or widespread fraud during the 2024 presidential election.

It is normal for voter turnout to fluctuate from election to election, experts said.

We rate these claims Pants on Fire!