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Out-voted

Did former President Barack Obama receive more votes in 2008 than Joe Biden has gotten this election cycle? No, that's not true: Ballots are still being counted in this election cycle, but Biden has already surpassed Obama's 2008 vote total. Biden has received about 2.5 million more votes than Obama did in 2008.

The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) where it was published by "The Hodgetwins" on November 4, 2020, with a caption that said, "No way this is factual " along with a post that read:

If you think Joe Biden in 2020 got more votes than Obama in 2008... you are bat s**t crazy

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

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Nov 5 14:14:31 2020 UTC)

As of this writing, Biden has received 72,400,382 votes, compared to Obama's 69,498,516 votes in 2008.

On the surface, it may seem as though the post is making a simple mathematical claim -- albeit false -- on the number of votes that Biden has gotten versus Obama's in 2008. But if the post's implication is that some of Biden's votes must be fraudulent, that implication is not substantiated by facts.

The U.S. population has grown by about 26 million since 2008 -- therefore more people are eligible to register and vote -- and the U.S. is on pace to break voter turnout records, so vote totals are going to be larger than in 2008.

And there is no authenticated evidence of widespread voter fraud in the U.S. during this election cycle.

Biden's total, as of this writing, has also surpassed Obama's vote total in 2012, in which the former president received 65,915,795 votes.

Updating this fact check in 2024, Lead Stories found the Federal Election Commission's final tally of 2020 votes showed Trump with 74,216,154 votes and Biden with 81,268,924.