A viral article from Gateway Pundit claims that “simple math” proves President-elect Joe Biden received 13 million more votes “Than There Were Eligible Voters Who Voted in 2020 Election.”
The article is based on a viral tweet, which stated: “With 212Million registered voters and 66.2% voting,140.344 M voted. Now if Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden.”
The tweet author’s math is off slightly based on the information he provides: Adding up the number of registered voters per state as listed on the website cited results in a figure of 213,799,467 registered voters. But a bigger error is made in the tweet: The Washington Postarticle from which the 66.2 percent figure is pulled refers to the voter turnout among the eligible voting population, not registered voters, as stated in the tweet and the subsequent Gateway Pundit article. Not all eligible voters end up registering to vote, with an estimate from Pew Research based on census data in 2017 suggesting that 21.4 percent of eligible voters were not registered to vote in 2014.
According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data on the voting age population in the United States, there was an eligible voting population of 233,565,291 Americans in 2018, with a margin of error of 3,256,891, producing a number quite a bit higher than the Gateway Pundit article suggests. This data comes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, for which a sample of the U.S. population is interviewed. The margin of error for the survey reflects a 90 percent confidence interval.
But this number is still not precise for the year 2020, for which experts have estimated an eligible voting population of 239,247,182. 66.2 percent of the 239,247,182 eligible voting population is 158,381,634 voters, which is, again, an estimate, but still significantly closer to the 158,394,605 votes cast in 2020 as reported by the Cook Political Report. According to Cook, Biden won 81,281,502 votes, while Trump won 74,222,593 votes. The remaining 2,890,510 votes went to third-party and write-in candidates.
There remains no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and “simple math” shows Biden did not win 13 million more votes than there are eligible voters in 2020.
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