Do 2024 results show "phantom" votes in 2020?
I've done a quick look at the claim that 2024 election results show that there were “phantom” votes in 2020. The claim rests on misinterpretation of preliminary data: many states, especially California and other blue states, had very incomplete results this morning.
To make a preliminary estimate of final popular votes by state, I manually (laboriously) collated current numbers from state webpages at NYT (e.g. California here) and projected final counts by multiplying current counts by 1/percentage_counted. I compared this to 2020 final count by state (link).
Somewhat to my surprise, the results are not as alarming as one presumes at first glance. California is only 54% counted. Also most strong D states are slow counting. So there could be another 10 million in inventory. The real decline is probably about 5 million and seems to be distributed mostly according to population. Biggest decline is going to be in CA, NY, FL, IL, NJ, TX with declines in blue states OR, MA, MD, CT, VT etc. In battleground states, D votes look likely to have been about the same (NV,AZ,PA) or even increased very slightly (GA,WI, NC,MI). Trump gained votes across the board. The margins in battleground states were due to increased Trump votes, not collapse of Dem votes. This contradicts early talk of the difference being due to collapse of phantom voters. And to that extent is reassuring about validity of both elections.
Here’s a spreadsheet showing calculation.
