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There is no doubt that improprieties impacted the 2020 presidential election. Suppression of free speech by social media platforms, Zuckbucks, and above all the concealment of definitive evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption by the Dirty 51 and the press, very likely swung the election to Biden.

But how about outright voter fraud? We will never know how extensive the fraud was, since the essence of a successful fraud is that it is not detected, or at least not proved. But a look at the gross numbers can provide a meaningful context for the question.

Shortly after the election, someone created a graphic that got wide circulation on the internet and on social media. It showed the number of votes cast for the Democratic presidential nominee in recent cycles, and indicated a remarkable upsurge in votes in 2020, followed by a steep decline in 2024. Unfortunately, that chart was created while vote counting was still going on, so it was not accurate as to 2024. I decided to carry out a similar exercise, using the final numbers for 2024.

This chart shows the result of that analysis. It shows the total popular vote in each presidential election from 2004 through 2024. Votes for the Democratic candidate are in blue, for the Republican candidate are in red. I used FEC numbers for all the cycles before 2024; the FEC has not yet published data for this year’s race.

This is the table from which I created the chart. I rounded all numbers to the nearest 1,000:

2004

Bush 62,041,000
Kerry 59,028,000
Total 121,069,000

2008

McCain 59,948,000
Obama 69,499,000
Total 129,447,000

2012

Romney 60,934,000
Obama 65,916,000
Total 126,850,000

2016

Trump 62,985,000
Clinton 65,854,000
Total 128,839,000

2020

Trump 74,224,000
Biden 81,284,000
Total 155,508,000

2024

Trump 77,269,000
Harris 74,984,000
Total 152,253,000

A few things obviously stand out. Turnout was virtually flat from 2004 through 2016. Then, many more votes were cast in 2020 and 2024. Why? No doubt the main reason is that many (I think most) states have shifted from an Election Day to an election season. That change has allowed both parties to harvest ballots in a manner that was never seen before. Democrats got into the ballot harvesting business first, but Republicans have more or less caught up.

That said, the vote totals for 2020 are still striking. Altogether, for both candidates, there were nearly 27 million more ballots cast in 2020 than in 2016–a total that then declined by around 3.3 million in 2024. It was Joe Biden who got the biggest bump: he received 15,430,000 more votes in 2020 than Hillary Clinton had received four years earlier. And he also got 6,300,000 more votes than his vice president, Kamala Harris, received in 2024.

Was that due to Biden’s stunning and unprecedented popularity with Democrat-leaning voters? It wouldn’t seem so. Biden’s performance in the 2020 Democratic primaries was uninspiring: he finished fifth in New Hampshire with just 8% of the vote, trailing Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. He lost six more states to Sanders, including California–by 450,000 votes!

Were Democrats wildly excited about Biden by the time the general election rolled around? Or rather, were they vastly more excited about Biden than about Hillary Clinton, the first-woman-president-to-be in 2016, or Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012? Not that I remember.

To be fair, the Republican vote increased significantly in 2020, too. Donald Trump got 11,239,000 more votes when he ran for re-election than he had gotten four years earlier. You can chalk some of that up to the fact that he was running for re-election as a successful president.

But part of what was going on here was covid. States encouraged mail-in voting, and unprecedented numbers of ballots were cast that way–more, even, than in 2024. As Hillary Clinton and many others have pointed out, mail-in voting is inherently more vulnerable to fraud than voting in person. But beyond that, did covid hysteria and unceasing encouragement of mail-in voting somehow result in more ballots being cast for both candidates? Perhaps.

Another possible explanation for Biden’s extraordinary 2020 vote total is that Democrats were fired up to vote against Donald Trump. No doubt that is true. But were they more fired up than in 2016? More fired up than in 2024, after the Democrats had impeached Trump twice, criminally indicted him multiple times, convicted him once, and repeatedly accused him of being a traitor and insurrectionist? I don’t think so.

So, notwithstanding the possibly unique conditions of 2020, Biden’s 15 million-plus gain in votes over 2016, followed by a 6 million-plus decline for the Democratic ticket in 2024, will always be suspicious.

Of course, some of those 6 million-plus votes went to Trump this time (although not most of them; Trump’s vote increased by 3 million overall). In the end, I think it is hard to account for those numbers without concluding that a large number of illegal ballots were cast in 2020–a large number more, that is, than the illegal ballots that were cast in 2016 or 2024.

Were enough fraudulent ballots cast to swing the 2020 election? That depends, of course, on how they were allocated. Several million fraudulent votes, if that is what the numbers suggest, would be vastly more than enough to change the results in all of the the swing states.

This is obviously a crude, top-line analysis, and others may poke holes in it. To know whether voter fraud (along with the other irregularities noted above) impacted the election in particular states, a far more granular look at counties and precincts would be necessary. And even then, the actual volume of invalid votes, and their impact on specific states, will never be proved. The same lack of controls that make voter fraud possible (and often easy), also prevent it from being disaggregated from vote totals after the fact.

Voter fraud can’t be remedied after it has occurred, if only because there isn’t time. It can only be prevented, which has gotten harder since the Democrats have made facilitation of voter fraud one of their top legislative priorities for a number of years. Happily, the national GOP has gotten better at this, and there are good reasons to think that Republicans are now preventing more fraud than was the case in prior cycles. (See, for example, my interview with Cleta Mitchell.)

But the GOP’s anti-fraud efforts need to continue and to expand. Eternal vigilance, as someone once said, is the price of honest elections.