What Happened to the ‘Missing Votes’ from 2020?

There appears to be a simple explanation for the total vote disparity between 2020 and 2024: Millions of votes, particularly in California, Nevada and Arizona, have yet to be counted.

It has long been taboo to discuss the election results of 2020 in mainstream media. But a new bar graph sweeping social media has reignited the controversy.

It shows a seemingly unaccountable spike in Democratic voters in 2020, when President Joe Biden garnered more than 81 million votes. This was a sharp uptick from former President Barack Obama’s totals in 2008 and 2012, when he won 69 million and 66 million votes, respectively. And, as the graph shows, it was also far above Vice President Kamala Harris’ total vote — which, as of Friday afternoon, sat at 68 million.

Even some of the most anti-Trump writers on the internet have expressed bafflement at the disparity.

“Really not trying to stoke conspiracy,” wrote popular liberal blogger John Pavlovitz on X, formerly Twitter, “but is it really feasible that Dem enthusiasm at near Obama levels, an insurrection, the fall of Roe, Trump’s SCOTUS immunity deal, and Project 2025 — really yielded 15 million fewer blue voters? Help it make sense.”

The seeming discrepancy between Biden’s 2020 record-high vote total and the surrounding elections has reignited accusations of a “rigged” election that year. And, perhaps ironically, it has caused numerous Democrats to question the results of this year’s election. Some were even disappointed that Harris conceded the election before “finding” the missing Democratic votes between 2020 and 2024.

But there appears to be a simple explanation for the disparity: Millions of votes, particularly in California, Nevada and Arizona, have yet to be counted. Though races in these states have been officially called, quirks in the counting process mean that final results sometimes take days, if not weeks.

In Nevada, reports indicate that vote counting has been slow-going due to the discovery of “irregular ballots.” In at least 700 cases, ballots from mostly younger voters did not show signatures that matched their IDs. This level of voting scrutiny should come as welcome news to election skeptics.

In California, where voters can cast mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day, votes are still arriving and being counted. This means the process could take days, if not weeks, to finish in the nation’s most populous state. As of Friday afternoon, only 58% of the overall vote from California has been tallied, which amounts to just over 10 million votes. This means just under another 10 million votes are expected to be counted before the process is finalized.

In other words, California alone accounts for approximately just under 10 million of the “missing” votes.

Despite the high total of outstanding votes, news organizations such as AP called California for Harris on election night due to exit polling and projections. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1 in the Golden State.

And in Arizona, where only 69% of the vote had been officially tallied by Thursday, voters have numerous options for voting, including mail-in voting, drop-box voting, and bringing their ballot in person to an early voting center. And the multitude of options gums up the counting process.

To make things even slower, these states allow for a generous provisional ballot process. This is done to ensure that voters who encounter administrative errors can cast a ballot, which will be counted following research by officials in the proceeding days. In Arizona, these ballots can take 10 days to be verified and added to the official vote count.

The Federal Election Commission reports that 158,429,631 people voted in the 2020 presidential election, according to USA Today. As of Friday afternoon, approximately 142 million votes have been counted.

None of this is to say, of course, that voter fraud doesn’t happen, nor that it didn’t happen in 2020 or in this election. But with estimated vote totals in 2024 appearing similar to 2020 once each ballot is counted, it’s safe to say that allegations of a “missing vote” don’t add up.