Where our numbers are wrong

For as long as this site has been live, the national map showed Texas at R+6.8 on 22.8 million votes. Texas cast 11.4 million votes in 2024 and voted R+13.7. The same error doubled Wisconsin, South Carolina and West Virginia — West Virginia was published at R+20.9 against a true R+41.9.

The cause: our source files a pseudo-candidate literally named TOTAL VOTES CAST with an empty party field. Our parser treated an empty party as “other”, so in the 427 county-cycles carrying that row we added each county's own total to itself. A separate 796 rows record undervotes, overvotes and spoiled ballots — ballots with no presidential selection, the opposite of a vote — and those were being counted as third-party support in 151 more cycles.

Both are fixed. Every state now reconciles against the certified statewide result. The uncomfortable part is how long it stood: the doubled figure was on the front page, and Texas at R+6.8 is checkable by anyone who followed the election. It was found while adding per-candidate vote counts to county pages — which is to say, by finally publishing the underlying numbers rather than only the margin derived from them.

Every county-year is now compared against the source file's own declared ballot total — a number we never derive. Two conventions are both legitimate and both present: some states count undervotes in that total and some do not, so a county passes if it matches either reading. Anything else is an anomaly and gets named.

It runs as part of the data build and exits non-zero on failure, so the four doubled states could not be published again without the build stopping. Re-running it against the old aggregation flags 429 county-years — the bug it was written for.

What it does not do: the control is the same publisher's own column, so it catches our errors and not theirs. An independent statewide cross-check would catch more.

North Carolina's 2024 Supreme Court race between Allison Riggs and Jefferson Griffin was decided by 734 votes in the certified canvass. Summing the precinct file we build from gives 66. The precinct breakdown is missing 910 ballots that the state canvass includes.

This is why the race page carries a warning instead of a result. A 66-vote margin and a 734-vote margin are different facts, and only one of them is the law.