Claim:

On U.S. Election Day 2024, a Google search for “where can I vote for Harris” (the name of the Democratic presidential candidate) brought up a special map, while the same search with the name “Trump” (the Republican candidate) does not.

Rating:

What is true

It’s true that the query “where can I vote for Harris” triggered a map, but not “where can I vote for Trump.”

What is wrong

However, according to Google, the map was not triggered by “Harris,” a candidate’s last name, but by “Harris,” the name of a county in Georgia or Texas. The special feature worked based on users entering names that the search engine recognized as U.S. cities, counties and states. Unlike “Harris,” “Trump” was not recognized as the name of a city, county, or state.

A rumor circulating on Election Day 2024 claimed that Google displayed a special map showing polling locations when users typed in a particular search query that included the last name of US Vice President Kamala Harris, but not that of the former President Donald Trump.

For example, user I vote for Trump.

The user job (archive) read: “BREAKING: Google displays a ‘Where to Vote’ section with a map for Kamala Harris, but not for Donald Trump. Google is the largest corporate donor to the Democratic Party. At the time of writing, the publication showed more of 18.5 million views (According to. OpenSecrets.orgGoogle doesn’t appear to be the largest corporate donor to the Democratic Party.)

X owner and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk amplified the rumor, asking in a repost (archive) from DogeDesigner’s post: “Are others seeing this too?” Musk’s post received an additional 17.2 million views.

However, the truth was less mysterious than it seemed at first glance. The special card appeared in Google search results based on users entering what the search engine recognized as a query for the name of a city, county or state. Harris is the name of two counties in Georgia and Texas, according to SimpleMaps.com. According to the same source, Trump is not the name of any city or county.

Google clarified the issue in a post from the official X News from Google account (@NewsFromGoogle), explaining that while “Trump” didn’t pull up, identical searches using the last name of Trump’s running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance, produced a map similar to the one that appeared for Harris. Google job (archive): “The Where to Vote sign triggers some specific searches because Harris is also the name of a county in Texas. This also happens for “Vance” because it is also the name of a county. A fix is coming. Note very few people search for polling stations this way.

Additional research

Seconds after our searches confirming a query using “Harris” produced a card when “Trump” did not, we conducted a similar search inserting the last name of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. This search also produced no maps, a result we expected, given that we found no city or county named Stein. (As an interesting counterexample, a search using an independent candidate’s last name Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also didn’t show any maps, even though Kennedy is the name of four localities – either cities or census-designated places – in Alabama, California, Minnesota and New York.)