It happens every four years, and it has started again. The morning after the election, people look at how many people voted and wonder why the number is a lot lower than they expected. Often, they notice that it is lower than it was in the previous election. That starts the wheels spinning. Maybe millions of people stayed home in protest because my favorite issue was ignored or because my favorite candidate did not get the nomination! Maybe the election was rigged to keep people from voting! Maybe the last election was rigged with phony votes, and now we can prove it! We have recently seen some Democrats argue that reduced turnout compared with 2020 means that this election is fishy, and we’ve seen some Republicans argue that it means that Biden had received a lot of fake votes last time.
No, no, no, no, and no. There are fewer votes on the board today because they are still being counted. I wrote back in 2015 about the bizarre persistence of people who claimed, three years after the 2012 election, that millions of conservatives had stayed home in 2012 just because Mitt Romney got fewer votes than John McCain. But Mitt Romney got more votes than John McCain. It just took a few weeks to count them all largely because California is the biggest state in the country, its polls close late in the evening, and the state counts votes with the speed of a three-toed sloth with a hangover. In March, I wrote about the scandal of California’s still counting votes eight days after the Senate primary and about how California has such long-standing issues in this area that the one time it was decisive in the presidential race — in 1916 — the nation was stuck for a week waiting for a final result. One House primary in March took two months to count and wasn’t finished until May. In 2022, a House race in California was resolved a month late.
It’s not just California. Mail-in ballots are more common now, and in many states (such as New York) only need to be postmarked on Election Day. Alaska has the one-two punch of long distances to ship ballots and ranked-choice voting (which is also used in Maine). All of this slows down the process, and much of that is reflected in incomplete tallies.
We will know, by the end of this month, how many people voted. We don’t know that yet. I am begging you all: Stop trying to compare those numbers before we have them.