Tens of thousands of social media users share posts pretending to show a map of the 2020 presidential election results, and some users claim that the map proves that Republicans won the election. This statement is untrue: the map shows the results of the 2016 presidential election, with the exception of Alaska for which the results do not match the 2020 or 2016 presidential election.
The posts (here, here ) shows a map of the United States divided into provinces, where most map is colored in red, but some provinces are colored in blue. Captions include: “WE WON” and “Biden supporters seem to lose their heads over how angry they become when you tell them that Biden ‘won’ only 16% of the provinces.”
The 2020 election results by country can be seen in Reuters Edison research election results by state here and as a full map here. The map shared in the social media reports does not match the 2020 results: Biden has won counties including Inyo County (California), Grand County (Utah), Garfield County (Colorado) and Ziebach County (South -Dakota), all of which are shown as red on the map shared on social media (here). Some counties, including Reeves County, La Salle County and Frio County, all in Texas, are shown as Democrats on the map shared on social media, but were won by Republicans in the 2020 election (here).
Biden won the 2020 presidential election with 306 votes for Trump’s 232 (the same margin by which Trump beat Hilary Clinton in 2016), as shown by sites like Reuters here, Fox News here, CNN here and NBC News here. On December 14, the Electoral College confirmed Biden’s victory (here) after Trump repeatedly made false allegations of widespread voter fraud, filed the legal challenge of the vote totals, and delayed the presidential transition.
The election card that appeared on social media was used in an image created in October 2019 by Jetpack.ai co-founder Karim Douïeb to represent the 2016 election results, here and here.
The animation was made to show how maps of election results per country can be misleading, as rural provinces represent many land masses but do not have as many people as urban provinces (here). Douïeb created a similar map after the 2020 election results, here .
This concept is also visualized by “Engaging Data” (here) when “show land circles” are chosen, it seems that the Republicans dominated the election in 2020, but when “show population circles” are chosen, the Democrats’ victory is apparent.
Maps of the 2016 presidential election results by county of the New York Times (here) and the Washington Post (here) show that the map used in social media and Jetpack.ai charts accurately depicts the results of the 2016 presidential election , apart from Alaska, which according to them is entirely Republican, while seven of Alaska’s constituencies voted in democracy.
This is possible because Dubai’s original animation is based on a map of election results tweeted by Lara Trump (here) and President Trump (here), which made several Democrat-winning provinces appear Republican (here, here). After realizing that the map was inaccurate, Jetpack.ai modified their map, but did not change Alaska (here).
Reuters has disrupted other maps that falsely pretend to show the 2020 election results here, here.
VERDICT
Untrue. The map shows the presidential election results from 2016, not 2020, for all states except Alaska.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.