Posts on social media after presidential election were in turmoil over the disparity in the vote count between 2020 and 2024.

Preliminary tallies show that the president-elect Donald Trump with almost as many votes as he received in 2020, when he failed in his re-election bid against Joe Biden. Trump now appears to have 73.3 million votes; in 2020, he earned 74.2 million.

But the vice president Kamala Harris appears to have won about 12 million fewer votes than Biden did against Trump in 2020. Biden won 81.2 million votes in 2020; Harris has 69 million votes so far.

This has prompted many on the left to assert that “Trump cheated”, while some on the right insisted the results proved the 2020 election was actually rigged. Harris’ vote total this time, they note, was consistent with Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

There is no reason to think of a decline among the Democrats“Voter turnout should raise a red flag,” said Hans von Spakovsky, director of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation.

“Turnout can vary greatly from election to election, from race to race, and from state to state,” von Spakovsky told the Daily Signal. “In a typical national election, turnout across states can also vary significantly. It depends entirely on the candidates, the issues, and how much voters care about the candidates or how much they care about issues like the economy. When they don’t like their choices, they don’t participate. »

It is easier to register today and then vote than at any time in recent history, he noted.

“There are absolutely no reports of anyone being prevented from voting and certainly if 20 million people were somehow prevented from voting, that’s not something you could keep it secret,” von Spakovsky said.

While votes are still being counted in several states, turnout for 2024 is expected to be around 62.25% of registered voters, with a total of 152.9 million voters, according to the Election laboratory at the University of Florida. This would be down from a 66.38% participation in 2020when 159.7 million voters cast their ballots.

Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington are among the states that tend to be slower in getting to the final tally, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics , a think tank at the University of Virginia.

“There could be 10 million votes that were not counted,” Kondik told the Daily Signal.

However, he stressed that this does not “prove” anything.

“The 2020 elections saw the highest turnout in modern times. When there is a record election, turnout in subsequent years will not always follow that record,” Kondik said. “Many voters who voted for Biden in 2020 changed their vote to Trump in 2024. Or some didn’t vote. This does not mean that there was voter suppression, voter fraud, or anything nefarious. One candidate wins. That’s how it works.

Once all the votes are counted, Trump could have more votes than he received in 2020, or about the same. This is the first of three presidential elections in which Trump won the popular vote as well as the electoral college.

Harris’ 69 million votes cast was more than Clinton’s 65.8 million votes in 2016, when she lost to Trump. That’s equal to Obama’s 69.4 million votes in 2008, and more than Obama’s 65.9 million when he won a second term in 2012.

The COVID-19 pandemic was likely a key factor in increasing voter turnout in 2020, since mail-in voting soared during lockdowns, said Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of State of New York in Buffalo, specializing in the electorate. turn out.

He cautioned that the final vote tally is not yet known and that more information will become clear after the release of the Cooperative Election Study, a Harvard analysis based on pre-election and post-election surveys.

“It seems like COVID has been an unusual year. Another likely culprit could be voter ambivalence or alienation,” Neiheisel told the Daily Signal in an email. “It’s often the case that voters who don’t find much to like about either candidate simply stay home on Election Day.”

“Similarly,” he added, “those who feel like their party has ‘left’ them will often do the same, hoping to ‘punish’ their party for failing to represent their preferred political positions.