BY MELISSA GOLDIN

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump was chosen The 47th president of the United States, social media users began pushing two conflicting narratives to suggest election fraud, one reviving Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was stolen and the other questioning how Vice President Kamala Harris could have received so many fewer votes in 2024 than President Joe Biden in 2020.

Both narratives are based on an alleged 20 million vote gap between Harris and Biden.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

PREVIEW: President Joe Biden won about 20 million more votes in the 2020 election than Vice President Kamala Harris won in the 2024 race, proving either Trump cheated his way to a second term or there was a large-scale fraud four years ago.

FACTS: The claims are unfounded. Votes from Tuesday’s presidential election are still being counted, so any comparison to previous races would be inaccurate. In addition, election officials and agencies monitoring the vote reported no significant problems with Tuesday’s election. Claims of widespread fraud in 2020 have been repeatedly debunked.

“As we have said time and time again, our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community has never been better prepared to provide safe, secure, free and fair elections for the American people,” said Jen Easterly, Director Agency for Cyber ​​Security and Infrastructure. said in a statement. “This is what we saw yesterday in the peaceful and safe exercise of democracy. Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that has had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

Several Pennsylvania officialsincluding Gov. Josh Shapiro, said they saw no sign of fraud and declared the election safe after Trump said in a Truth Social’s post On Tuesday, there was “a lot of talk about the massive CRASH in Philadelphia.”

And yet, posts circulated online arguing otherwise, receiving hundreds of thousands of likes and shares.

“20 million votes have been counted,” read one X post. “I KNOW TRUMP CHEATED.”

Another X post, which shared a bar graph of presidential election results from 2012-2024, states: “If these nuns are correct, this points to a stolen election in 2020. 20 million votes just disappeared. In other words, in the last cycle there were 20 million fraudulent votes. That’s a crazy number.” Democratic candidates in 2012 and 2016 both won nearly 66 million votes, slightly less than Harris’ current tally.

Harris had won approximately 67 million votes of Wednesday afternoon compared to that approximately 81 million Biden raised in 2020 – a difference of about 14 million. But that gap is narrowing as voting continues. No state has yet counted 100% of the ballots.

Trump is that far behind his 2020 total about 2 million votesbut this gap also decreases as more votes are counted.

Despite persistent claims that Trump won the 2020 election, including from Trump himself, there there is no proof that this is true.