Fact Check: The Number Of Voters In Michigan Did NOT Exceed The Number Of Registered Voters

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Fact Check: The Number Of Voters In Michigan Did NOT Exceed The Number Of Registered Voters
Nov 27, 2020 by: Victoria Eavis



Did 8.1 million people vote in Michigan in the general election when there were only 7.8 million registered voters? No, that's not true: 5,579,317 people voted in Michigan out of the 8,061,525 registered voters there were as of October 2020.

The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) where it was published on November 21, 2020 with the caption, "Has anyone heard ANY Democrats explain this? Yeah....there are allegations we don't have proof of YET, but also things they can and should be addressing, right? This is simple math...so even Democrats should be able to follow along." Accompanying this caption was a screenshot of a tweet that read:

8.1 Million "people" voted in Michigan. Here's the problem...there are only 7.8 Million registered voters. This isn't hard.

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:


(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Nov 27 15:57:16 2020 UTC)

For starters, only 5,579,317 people voted in the general election, according to data from the Secretary of State's office. The claim that 7.8 million people were registered to vote is also inaccurate: There were 8,061,525 registered voters as of October. The 7.8 figure could be emerging from the number of registered voters in Michigan in July, which was 7,748,541, according to a separate data set from the Secretary of State's office.

Michigan certified its election results on November 23, 2020.

Nonetheless, false claims about voter registration and voter turnout numbers have persisted on social media.

The tweet (archived here) that was screenshotted and included in the Facebook post came from @majorPatriot, an account with 208,200 followers:


Next, many social media users started posting these same false voter numbers and citing Newsmax as the source (archived here, here and here, respectively):



Social media users started citing Newsmax as their source on these false numbers presumably after Steve Bannon's guest on his Newsmax segment echoed the false claim that 8.1 million people voted in Michigan, a state with only 7.8 million registered voters. The interview clip appears in the following tweet :



Diamond and Silk, two hosts of a different Newsmax segment, posted on Parler making the same false claim about Michigan's voter turnout:

Why is it so hard for people to understand that if a state has 7.8 million registered voters, but 8.1 million voted, there could be potential fraud? How can 8.1 Million people vote in a state with only 7.8 registered voters? It doesn't add up, nor does it make sense!
-- Diamond And Silk DiamondAndSilk Thursday, November 26, 2020