Did 20 million votes really go missing in the US election?
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Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast where the program that looks at the numbers in the news. And I am Charles. In the early hours of wednesday, the sixth of november, this happened.

Thank you very much.

Donald trump, forty fifth th president of the united states, became the forty seventh president of the united states.

His Victory .

speech was jubilant. The greatest come back of all time been .

anything like this in this country, and maybe the.

but despite trump emerging Victorious in this election, just a few hours after his Victory speech, grievances es of old began to resurface, namely conspiracy. There is about the twenty twenty election which trump lost, that he said he was wicked ed, which IT wasn't.

I noticed this chart that was circulating on the social media sides and h in some emails that organizations were sending out. And basically it's a very simple bar chart .

that's mike wendling, the bbc's U. S. National digital reporter. He's been following claims of election fraud throughout this election campaign.

The chart oriented from an article published on the right wing news and finance blog zero hedge. A site has been previously banned by facebook. And what was then twitter for spreading .

disinformation? And what IT shows or allegedly shows, is that there were twenty million fewer votes cast in twenty four, then in twenty and twenty. And the people who are circulating this chart, we're using this as evidence in their eyes that the vote totals in were fragile and that there were sort of fake people invented or ballot box stuffing, whatever they were using IT to bolster their conspiracy theory. The Donald trump was the real winner in twenty and twenty, and that the election was stolen from him.

This claim wasn't just circulating online. IT was being discussed by some pretty big names too, such as pok sta, joe rogan, whose episodes pulled in an audience of up to eleven million listeners.

What do you think about that thing I sent you today that compares the number of people that voted in twenty and twenty versus number of people that voted in twenty, twenty four and in two thousand and sixteen .

shirt looks strange.

And in two thousand and twelve, have you seen a jammy? It's so crazy. You look at IT and you go, there's, is this real?

But tram supporters were not alone. People from the other side of the political divide also started to reference the graph, wanting to know whether missing twenty million voters were.

At the same time, we saw a rise in democrats. Supporters of koala Harris also inventing conspiracy theories, and in some uh, cases they were also pointing to this chart. They were saying, hey, look, we are missing all these votes, this surge in left wing and democrat conspiracy theory, this kind of something new that we've seen this year.

I would, however, say that IT is not quite approached the level of the stop the steel movement in twenty twenty that LED to that right at the capital. Camila hares herself is not entertaining. These top democratic party officials are not sort of repeating these rumors, so it's pretty much confined to the internet activists HMM.

The case of the missing twenty million voters sounds like one for sherlock homes, not for dear listeners. There is actually a very, very simple explanation for those missing twenty million votes.

There was a very important detail that they were missing, which is that the votes on wednesday had not all been counted. And so the statistics that we're being cited in that bar chart are completely outdated now, and we're never going to be anywhere close to the final vote totals.

Vote counting in the united states takes a while, so voting numbers can take a while to trickle in. This is because the us. Has a decentralized electoral system. Voting is run encounter at a state level, and each state does is slightly differently. Even different towns within the same state can have different procedures.

The rules in each state and accounting procedures, and actually the sort of technology varies, not just from state to state, but from city to city, cani to canny, sometimes district, district. I went to a training session for volunteers, uh, at one point in western wisconsin and overheard the election workers talk about the kinds of machines that they were using and how in one village they would use one kinds of machine and they weren't using those. In another village.

they are using a different process, but it's not just about machines. They even have different rules about post vote.

In some states, every voter gets mailed a ballot, and that ballot can be returned up to, in the case of a state like california, seven days after the actual election, as long as it's postmarked by election day. If your ballot gets to the county office in california is counted a week after the election, I guess a lot of the delay can be explained by the different patrik of rules.

As the votes continue to come in, the actual difference in turnout becomes clearer at the time of recording is still not entirely complete. However, based on data on the university of florida election lab, which has been analyzing voting rates and data, we can say that right now around one hundred and fifty six million votes have been counted.

This means that so far by these figures, there have been around four million fewer votes cast that in twenty twenty. Now this might sound like a large number, but when you think that almost a hundred and sixty million people voted in the twenty election, it's a relatively small drop in the electoral pond. Vote to turn out tends to factory year by year. It's not a surprise for the figure to rise or fall by a few percentage points. But twenty twenty, with someone of an outlier, more people did vote.

This can probably be explained by several factors. In number one, the polar ized impact of Donald trump and joe biden, there was a lot of interest in the election itself. Number two, because of the pandemic, which was happening at the time, there were a lot of questions about getting people to the polls safely and how that could be done.

As a result, many states loosened rules about absented voting and mail in voting. So rensin, there were many states that put in, uh, no excuse, absent voting. In other words, you didn't have to give a reason or you didn't have to say that you're going to be away from home in order to work by mail, for instance.

Uh, there was a huge number of these, a rule changes that made IT easier to vote across a number of different states and locality ties. Some of those were retained in twenty, twenty four, and others were repealed. So that might affect the turnout.

The twenty twenty election turnout Spike also looks more extreme because china in the twenty sixteen election was low.

In twenty sixteen, you had two very unpopular candidates and turnout was a little bit lower in twenty sixteen. So when there was the Spike in twenty twenty, IT seemed like a very .

high Spike in percentage times, again from the university of florida 港 lab numbers of eligible voters， about sixty percent turned out in two thousand sixteen, this went up to sixty six percent. And and as we record to stand a little bit this year at around sixty four percent, that we'd like to extend our apologies to all of those who were hoping for some election rigging drama. This website, de, there was none.

Instead, this whole sago was just a lesson in how not to make claims based on incomplete data. Thanks to my wendling. Now Christmas is fast approaching.

Belt in, children are singing and and are more or less else. Are preparing for our numbers of the year program. This time, we'd like to include you are loyal listeners.

What number do you think should be number of the year right into us more or less? A, B, B, C, D, C, O, W, K, and please don't save all you too. That's all we have time for this week until next time. goodbye.