No, there are not nearly 20 million ‘unaccounted for’ votes

The Associated Press declared former President Donald Trump the winner of the 2024 presidential election Wednesday morning after it projected Trump to win enough states to secure the 270 votes needed for a majority in the electoral college.

Several people began questioning the vote count in viral social media posts just a few hours later. They compared the vote count at the time the AP called the race to the vote of the 2020 presidential election and questioned how this election could potentially have record turnout while being 18 million votes shy of the 2020 total.

Some people said those nearly 20 million votes were “unaccounted for.”

THE QUESTION

Are there nearly 20 million unaccounted for votes?

THE SOURCES

• VERIFY analysis of AP vote total estimates

• Federal Election Commission (FEC)

• University of Florida’s Election Lab

THE ANSWER

No, there are not nearly 20 million unaccounted for votes. Those votes are still being counted.

WHAT WE FOUND

While it’s true that the vote count of the 2024 presidential election as of Wednesday afternoon is nearly 20 million votes shy of the total vote for the 2020 presidential election, that’s because many states, most of which aren’t swing states, are still counting millions of ballots. 

Using the current AP estimate of the percent of votes counted, VERIFY found that 20 of the 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., still have more than 16.2 million ballots left to be counted as of Wednesday afternoon.

At the time of VERIFY’s count, there were 16.7 million fewer votes than the final total cast for Biden and Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Most of the states that are still counting a significant number of ballots have already been called for a candidate due to statistical analysis. The uncounted ballots will therefore not change the results of the Electoral College.

For example, the state with the most votes left to count, California, still has over 8.3 million votes to count, or 46% of its estimated total votes cast, according to the AP. Many of these remaining ballots are in cities and suburbs that typically favor Democrats. Although California’s remaining ballots may help Harris pull closer to or even surpass Trump’s popular vote count, these remaining ballots will not impact the result of the electoral college because California has already been projected as a Harris victory.

The state with the next most uncounted ballots, Washington, which has 1.5 million remaining ballots, is similar to California: most of the remaining ballots are in the Democratic-leaning Seattle metro area, but the state has already been projected to go to Harris.

The third state with more than 1 million uncounted votes remaining is a swing state: Arizona. But while Arizona has yet to be called for either candidate, Trump is already projected to win enough other states to reach 270 electoral college votes that the results in Arizona for president will not change the outcome of the race.

Harris has also been projected to win the three other states with the fourth, fifth and sixth most remaining ballots to count: Colorado, Maryland and Oregon.

The AP has already called one swing state, Georgia, that still has a significant number of uncounted ballots. But those uncounted ballots doesn’t mean the projection is wrong or came too early.

At the time of VERIFY’s count, Georgia still had more than 160,000 votes to count, the largest share coming from the heavily Democratic Fulton County. But Trump’s lead at the time was about 120,000 votes, which would mean Harris would have to win well over 80% of the remaining ballots to take the state. In Fulton County, she has won a little more than 70% of the votes counted so far.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) says 158,429,631 votes were cast for president in 2020. It’ll be some time before we get the official numbers, but the University of Florida’s Election Lab estimates that just about that number of ballots will again be counted in 2024.