What to Know About the Millions of So-Called ‘Missing Votes’ in 2024 US Election

In the aftermath of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election, one particular fact stuck out to many users on social media: In the 2020 election, Democratic nominee Joe Biden earned more than 81 million votes, to Republican nominee Trump’s 74 million. But in 2024, Trump had more than 72 million votes while Vice President Kamala Harris had just 68 million. Why the discrepancy in the total number of votes between the two elections?

Some Trump supporters claimed the discrepancy in Democratic votes proved that the 2020 election was stolen. Some Harris supporters claimed the discrepancy proved the 2024 election was stolen.

Neither claim was true, for a very simple reason: The millions of “missing” votes weren’t actually missing — they simply hadn’t been counted yet.

There is no national authority running elections in the United States. Instead, thousands of small, locally run elections take place simultaneously, based on rules set at the state level. Not all states have systems to quickly track and report election results, however. 

In place of the states, that work falls to The Associated Press, which has called U.S. elections for more than 170 years. In a series of articles before the 2024 election, the AP explained how the process works and how it predicts the outcome of an election before all of the votes have been reported. Immediately after polls close and workers begin counting the ballots, more than 4,000 AP reporters at county election offices across the country wait for the numbers to come in. Reporters then send the statistics to the AP’s vote entry center, which also monitors state- and county-run election websites.

Those numbers are constantly updated on the the AP’s website as they come in, and the AP uses the results in combination with the state’s voting history and other election statistics to determine whether a candidate has an insurmountable lead, even when there are still ballots to be counted. When the AP called the 2024 race for Trump, millions of ballots had not yet been counted.

Snopes used the AP’s data to calculate that as of noon Central Time on Nov. 7, two days after the election, more than 143 million ballots had been counted and reported across the nation, but there were still approximately 14.9 million ballots outstanding — about 10% of ballots had not been counted yet.

Many of those were in California, which had an estimated 8.2 million ballots left to count. There were more than 1.1 million outstanding ballots in Arizona, 800,000 in Colorado, 750,000 in Washington, 650,000 in Maryland and 550,000 in Oregon. The AP reported that these states have high rates of mail-in voting, which takes longer to count. In addition, some states allow mail-in ballots postmarked before Election Day to arrive late.

Because the outcome of a U.S. election can be called before every ballot has been counted and the vote totals immediately after the election are only preliminary, it’s wise to refrain from making comparisons in overall voter turnout from one election to the next until the votes are all counted and the official totals are released by The Associated Press and the state election boards. 

Sources