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December 23, 2025
The mystery of the missing votes: 2020 vs. 2024
By
Bradley Steffens
The
recent admission by Ann Brumbaugh, attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, that 315,000 illegally certified votes were included in Georgia’s 2020 final vote totals, has once again raised the issue of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
After the 2024 election, the New York Times published “
An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election,” showing a rightward shift in precincts across the country. Commentators have explained this as a surge in Trump’s support. But the map tells another story: The real shift came from a dramatic drop in Democrat votes between 2020 and 2024. That decline and reports like the one from Fulton County raise troubling questions about what really happened in 2020.
Kamala Harris received 6.2 million fewer votes in 2024 than Joe Biden did in 2020. Trump’s vote total rose by about 3 million from 2020 to 2024. That leaves more than 3 million votes unaccounted for. Did millions of Biden voters simply stay home? Or were a large number of 2020 ballots never legitimate to begin with?
Adding to the intrigue, the
Election Lab at the University of Florida reports that the voting-eligible population (VEP) grew by 4 million between 2020 and 2024 but turnout fell by 3.4 million. More Americans were eligible to vote in 2024 than in 2020, but fewer ballots were cast. That is unusual. Historically, a growing electorate produces higher turnout, not lower.
Vote.org reports that more than one million new voters registered before the 2024 election. Tufts CIRCLE found that Harris carried the youth vote by 4 points, 51 to 47%. Assuming that figure held for new voters, most of whom were young, Harris underperformed Biden by even more than 6.2 million votes seen in the raw vote total. Harris’s deficit was at least 6.7 million votes. If the votes didn’t go to Trump, where did they go?
The historical record makes the 2020 voting surge stand out even more. As the chart below shows, turnout as a share of the VEP jumped to 65.3% in 2020 — the highest in modern history — before slipping back to 63.9% in 2024. That spike, followed by a decline — despite a larger VEP — is an anomaly that demands explanation.
Figure 1: U.S. presidential election turnout as a percentage of the Voting Eligible Population (1980–2024). Source: United States Elections Project, Michael McDonald, University of Florida.
The long-term historical trend tells the same story, but even more dramatically. When turnout is measured as a share of the total U.S. population, the 2020 election stands out as a spike, followed by a decline in 2024.
Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Related Topics: 2020 Election,
2024 Election