In the interest of correcting misinformation as quickly as possible (and to fess up to self-correction) I'm making this quick and dirty post to respond to the meme that Joe Biden outperformed Kamala by 15 million votes which makes the 2020 election results seem incredibly fishy.

In reality, the voter turnout for 2020 and for 2024 were both much higher than the previous three elections simply because mail-in voting got very popular in 2020, stayed very popular in 2024, and early voting also got very popular in 2024.

Kamala and Biden both activated the "anyone-but Trump" Democrat base, but Biden simply did better to the tune of about 5 million votes. If Biden did actually did better than Kamala to the tune of 15 million votes, then that would be fishy and would raise red flags. But that's not what happened. The votes are still coming in. We can project that after all the votes are counted, that Kamala will end up with about 76M, more or less, and Trump will end up with about 79M, more or less. So Biden, in 2020 with 81M votes, only outperformed Kamala by about 5M votes.

Jonatan Pallesen has shown that we can simply use the BBC "Expected votes counted (%)" table to make these projections of the total votes after all the expected votes are counted.

My simple contribution in this post is just to recreate Pallesen's graph and include a link to my python script that downloads the data, parses the data, and computes the total, and generates the barchart all in one go: