Election Fraud: Have 20M Votes Gone Missing?
On November 6, the day after the election, a far-right financial and political blog called Zero Hedge shared a misleading chart to his 2M followers on X. The caption reads, “Sorry to beat a dead horse, but can we go back to what happened here?” Hedge isn’t sorry for anything, and he’s clearly engagement farming.
As you can see, the chart shows a huge discrepancy in democratic voters throughout the last four elections. The general implication of the chart is that 2020 saw an abrupt and significant increase in democratic voters, which some have interpreted as evidence that democrats engaged in voter fraud during the 2020 election. I.e., that democrats manufactured ballots to steal the election. A discrepancy of this size would be alarming if it were actually true.
While Hedge and company are happy to mislead their followers for the sake of engagement, Musk’s Community Notes stepped in to correct the misleading nature of Hedge’s post, which had already been shared tens of thousands of times.
According to the Community Note: “The graph is misleading. It shows the total number of votes for 2024 to be about 137 million, when we know turnout is projected to be close to 2020 (158 million). Some states are still counting ballots. California alone has millions of votes outstanding.”
Now that some time has passed, what does voter turnout look like?
As of November 15, data shows that about 155 million ballots were cast in 2024. This is a 64% turnout rate for eligible voters. 2020 saw 158 million ballots cast at a turnout rate of 66%.
Looking at the updated chart, we see how ballot counts have evolved from November 6 through November 23, and we find that Hedge’s suggestion of fraud was unfounded. And yet, the effects of such a falsehood lingers, damaging public trust in democratic processes. Hedge’s viral misconception highlights the seduction of conspiracy and the broader trend of exploiting low information individuals for personal gain.