Trump win in 2024 is not proof 2020 election stolen | Fact check

A Nov. 6 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) uses an image showing 2024 election results to claim President Joe Biden’s 2020 election vote totals were illegitimate.
The image shows President-elect Donald Trump with 71 million votes compared to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 66 million, and then two different users try to use it to prove election fraud benefiting different parties.
“How can the total number of voters be less this year than there were in 2020 after we’ve had the biggest turnout than ever before? (sic)” reads on-screen text included in the image, which is a screenshot of a post on X. “Demand a recount and an investigation. #DoNotConcedeKamala.”
The Facebook post’s caption, however, claims this shows fraud by Democrats, “Thank you for validating 2020 was a Strategic and Special Operation. ‘Joe’ got 81 million votes and there were more voters this year and President Trump’s current count is 71 million.”
The post was shared more than 400 times in a week and a half.
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While votes are still being counted, there is no evidence there was record-breaking turnout in the 2024 presidential election. The comparison in the post is based on partial voting tallies and isn’t proof of fraud benefiting either party. Numerous recounts and audits have affirmed Biden won the 2020 election.
While Trump’s victory in the 2024 election tamped down claims from the political right that the 2024 election was rigged, it hasn’t stopped attempts to relitigate the past – particularly the 2020 election.
But the idea that the 2020 election was stolen is flatly false, and USA TODAY has repeatedly debunked such claims since the days after that year’s final votes were cast and counted.
Numerous people and institutions involved in monitoring that election said there was no proof of widespread fraud, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Trump’s then-Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, multiple courts around the country, dozens of outside election security experts and a group of conservative legal scholars.
One of the claims addressed in the aftermath of the election was that Biden’s vote total was inflated through fraud. But the claim was found to be baseless, and multiple recounts and audits further verified Biden’s victory and vote total before Congress made the results official.
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The post also claims there was record voter turnout in 2024, but that was nowhere near accurate at the time of the post, is still wrong and is not expected to be true, according to reported vote totals and at least one expert forecast.
Some 158.4 million votes were cast in the 2020 election, of which 81.2 million went to Biden, according to the Federal Election Commission. That far outpaces the 141.9 million counted votes on Nov. 6 (when the Facebook post was shared) for the 2024 election, according to an archived version of results posted by NBC News. It also exceeds the 153.4 million counted votes for the 2024 election on a Cook Political Report tracker as of the afternoon of Nov. 19.    
That kind of change in vote totals is in line with historical trends. A paper from the MIT Election Lab showed that in 2020, 10.8% of the total official vote was “overtime vote” – tallied beyond what was reported in the morning edition of The New York Times on the Thursday after Election Day and included in the official final results. A similar increase in 2024 would put the final vote count close to, but not beyond, the 2020 total. Election analyst Nate Silver projected the final tally will be around 155.3 million votes in a Nov. 14 post on X, formerly Twitter.
USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
PolitiFact also debunked the claim.
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