Keep Calm and Let Them Count

There’s a chart going around showing national vote totals of the last few cycles that shows that the Democrats got roughly as many votes in 2024 as in 2016 with 2020 as a suspicious aberration. Suggesting, basically, that Trump was right about the election being stolen. My original thought was to mostly let this go because people are going to believe what they want to believe and Trump supporters are motivated to believe he was wronged, but I’m seeing non-Trump supporters take these misleading numbers at face value.

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but can we go back to what happened here? pic.twitter.com/FkScNHivuU

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 6, 2024

The chart looks bad, but is misleading for one big reason: Vote counting is still underway and there are a lot of votes still to be counted. But is it over ten million? Almost certainly. On the Thursday following the election 2020, there were 146 million counted and eventually that number would be 158 million. No one knows what the final tally in 2024 will look like, but it’s reasonable to believe that it will be close to or in excess of the 2020 vote.

In most of the states where Biden was accused of adding illegitimate votes, the tallies are finished and the number of ballots is similar too or in excess of 2020 votes. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia are all 99% complete and all have more votes in 2024 than 2020. As of the writing of this, Pennsylvania is at 98% and there is a gap of around 70,000 votes. There are some states that were considered swing states in 2020 or 2024 that will have lower vote counts, but they are ones that Trump won: North Carolina and Florida.

The states where you are seeing large deficits are the states with with the largest number of outstanding precincts. California alone likely accounts for 8 million uncounted ballots as they are less than 60% done. Oregon, Washington, and Colorado are all less than 80% done. Arizona, the only competitive state that Trump contested in 2020, is at 70%. Further, those “99%” states are staying at 99% because they don’t attach mail-in votes to precincts so they just keep it at 99% until all of those votes are counted.

Wanna issue a general reminder that "99% reporting" is kind of like "E" on your fuel gauge. There's a few dozen miles left in 'er after that.

— Frank Bednarz (@FrankBednarz) November 6, 2024

It seems intuitively unlikely that there could still be over ten million votes left uncounted, but for a variety of reasons that is precisely the situation we find ourselves in. It’s not a good look that most of the states with the slowest counts are blue states, but they’re also non-competitive and so at least on the presidential level it is extremely unlikely that the vote totals are being manipulated¹. And, to be clear, this state of affairs is entirely on the blue states. Democrats like to point to Pennsylvania and other states where Republicans are blocking quit counts, but Pennsylvania is almost done. It’s states like California and New York that are still going. That’s always going to look suspicious to some because it’s hard to justify.

The fact that it’s not just conservatives assuming that uncounted votes are a marginal contribution to the total goes to show that it’s not just an issue of “right-wing misinformation.” But all of this does not excuse misinformation. Most of the time when I’ve shared the above numbers, people have actually accepted the explanation. It’s honestly been quite encouraging. Others, however, are plugging their ears saying LALALALALALALALALA. Others still are arguing that the high turnout in 2024 is itself suspicious. At some point there really is nothing that can be done to prove a negative.

But for people arguing in good faith, hopefully this will cool things down. If you’re a Trump supporter you should be delighting in your victory rather than knowingly or unknowingly spreading misinformation. If you oppose Trump you need to realize that while the vote gap will shrink and the national popular vote margin will as well, Harris has almost certainly lost it. The electoral college can’t be blamed this time. It’s back to the drawing board. But that’s a subject for another day.

1. I have no reason to believe that they are being manipulated at other levels, either, but that’s being the purview of this post.