I was recently writing a post on how news organizations still haven’t updated their election results. As part of that post, of course, I tried to track down the “real” popular vote. That is, how many votes did President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney actually win, in reality?
More below.
I ran into a problem. Apparently nobody knows.Different organizations are reporting different numbers. To find reliable election results, most analysts go to Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. However, Dave’s numbers differ from those of Wikipedia. Wikipedia derived its numbers from the Federal Election Commission Report. Then there is Dave Wasserman, who with great labor added uncounted ballots to the numbers as they were counted. His numbers are slightly different as well. Here’s a table:
| Votes Won According to… | Barack Obama | Mitt Romney |
| Dave Leip | 65,917,257 | 60,932,235 |
| Dave Wasserman | 65,910,437 | 60,932,795 |
| Huffington Post | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Federal Election Commission Report | 65,915,796 | 60,933,500 |
| Wikipedia | 65,915,796 | 60,933,500 |
The vote counts by private individuals such as Dave Leip are probably the most accurate.
In addition, there is the fact that uncounted ballots were still being discovered and added to the official count. For instance, a stack of ballots was found in New York City in March. Dave Wasserman also has stated that the official certified results in some states are wrong; apparently the states incorrectly added up all the official county numbers.
The best way to find the popular vote is probably to add up individually all the official certifications of the vote by each state, which I may or may not do. Of course, we also have to be aware of the fact that some of these official certifications may be wrong.
We may never actually know how many votes Barack Obama and Mitt Romney won in the 2012 presidential election.
–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/