2024 election results don’t prove 2020 stolen election claims. Voters’ choices can change.

Conservatives are leveraging President-elect Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory to again allege the 2020 election was fraudulent.

"Kamala got 60 million votes in 2024," Dinesh D’Souza wrote around 8 a.m. ET Nov. 6 on X. "Does anyone really believe Biden got 80 million in 2020? Where did those 20 million Democratic voters go? The truth is, they never existed. I think we can put the lie about Biden’s 80 million votes to rest once and for all."

D’Souza was behind the widely discredited 2022 movie "2,000 Mules" that outlined an unsubstantiated effort by "mules" to illegally deposit ballots into ballot drop boxes to sway the 2020 election.

We saw similar claims from conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who called the 2020 to 2024 Democratic vote count difference "very sus," short for suspicious, and J.R. Majewski, an Ohio Republican who ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2022 and 2024, who declared the results proved "2020 was stolen." 

These claims are a revamped version of the persistent falsehood that the 2020 election was fraudulent, which PolitiFact has debunked countless times. 

(Screenshot from X)

We tried contacting D’Souza through his online store and Instagram account, and received no response before publication. 

The 2020 election was not stolen. President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. States certified the results, Congress accepted the results and Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. Election security officials — including Republicans and people in Trump’s own administration — have said the 2020 election was secure. When fraud occurred, it was isolated and did not change the results. In four years, Trump and his allies have produced no evidence of widespread fraud.

Across the country, Trump and his allies lost more than 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election outcome. A group of Republicans, including former federal judges, examined Trump and his allies’ fraud and miscount claims and concluded that they "failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results `significant enough to invalidate the results."’

Trump’s 2024 victory has not changed these facts. 

From election to election, millions of voters potentially shifting support from one party to another isn’t unusual, experts told PolitiFact. 

Kim Wyman, a Bipartisan Policy Center senior fellow, said about 40% of voters in the U.S. consider themselves independents and "elections are won and lost with that 40%." 

"Those middle voters vote all over the map and are the ones who decide the outcome," she said. 

Wyman, a Republican, was Washington’s secretary of state from 2013 to 2021, when she stepped down to take a position as a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency senior election security adviser. She said the explanation for the 2024 results would be in election return data.

"Democrats did not suddenly lose 20 million voters," she said, outlining potential explanations for the 2024 outcome. 

First, she said, it’s possible that 20 million Republicans or independent voters who either did not vote in the 2020 presidential election or voted for Biden in 2020 chose to vote for Trump in 2024. 

Second, it’s possible that solid Democrats who did not want to vote for Trump or Harris did not vote in 2024 or possibly chose another candidate, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Potentially, "the 20 million is a combination" of those two outcomes, Wyman said.

Jordan Barth, a former national and state Democratic Party staff member, said that even if the final vote counts show that 20 million more people voted for Biden in 2020 than voted for Harris in 2024, that wouldn’t prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. 

"We saw some pretty significant changes in 2016 with the electorate," said Barth, who in 2020 was the hotline and research coordinator for the Democratic National Committee’s civic engagement and voter protection department. Places that had voted for Democratic President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 went for Trump in 2016. Then, in 2020, at least some of those voters "went back to Biden." 

Wyman said election officials used the same processes and protocols during the 2020 and 2024 elections.

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stated on November 12, 2024 in a Threads post

“It was just Biden and Trump in 2020” general election ballots.

"While some states may have changed some laws, the security control measures remained consistent," she said. "Just because voters show up and vote differently four years later doesn't mean there is fraud or suppression. It could just mean that voters changed their minds."

William Adler, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Election Project associate director, said the stolen 2020 election claims overlook a misleading and basic detail: The popular vote isn’t known yet.

Although state margins, in terms of percentage points, might be close to the final results, current claims about actual numbers of voters hold little weight. 

"As counting continues, the difference between the number of votes Biden received and the number that Harris received is guaranteed to shrink," he said. 

That is already playing out. By 2 p.m. ET Nov. 6, the Harris vote totals that Johnson, Majewski and D’Souza mentioned in their X posts were outdated: Harris had received more than 67 million votes — and that was with incomplete counts in several states with high numbers of Democrats, including California, Oregon and Washington. 

"California is currently only 60% reported," Charles Stewart III, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab, told PolitiFact at around 12:30 p.m. ET. States including Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Mississippi, Oregon, Utah and Washington "still have at least 20% of their votes to report."

D’Souza claimed the results of the 2024 election show that Biden’s 80 million votes in 2020 were a "lie."

Republican state and federal officials said the election was secure and dozens of judges have rejected Trump lawsuits alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election. 

From election to election, voters shifting support from one party to another — or forgoing voting — isn’t unusual or a sign of fraud, experts said. They also warned that votes are still being counted, and the margin of votes separating Harris’ 2024 total and Biden’s 2020 total is likely to shrink.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire! 

PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman and PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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