Ohio GOP candidate: According to the Census Bureau, "5 million more people voted than were registered to vote" in the 2020 election.
PolitiFact's rating: Pants on Fire!
Here's why: In the race to fill the U.S. Senate seat now held by retiring Republican Rob Portman, all but one of the candidates for the Republican nomination cast suspicion on the 2020 presidential election. At a recent debate, businessman Mike Gibbons, a top contender, repeated a favored talking point.
"Five million more people voted than were registered to vote," Gibbons said March 28. "And that’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau. There’s a problem. We need to investigate it. The Jan. 6 commission should be investigating that instead of some sort of false accusation of some sort of insurrection."
Gibbons is wrong. No numbers back up his claim of 5 million more votes cast than there were people registered to vote. We’ve checked iterations of this statement before and found them false. Gibbons’ invocation of the Census Bureau failed to improve his accuracy.
The Census Bureau reported in April 2021 that its surveys found 168,308,000 registered voters, and 154,628,000 votes cast in the 2020 election. Neither is an exact figure; these estimates are based on people’s answers to survey questions. But since Gibbons name checked the Census Bureau, it’s worth noting that, according to the bureau, there were at least 13 million more registered voters than people who voted.
That’s the opposite of what Gibbons asserted as fact.
Gibbons spoke as if the Census Bureau was the gold standard for election results. But data collected from the states gives a more accurate picture of the number of registered voters and the number of ballots cast.
In its latest report to Congress, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission said numbers sent to them by state election officials showed there were 209,441,338 active registered voters in 2020, more than the Census Bureau found. "Active" registered voters includes people who meet every requirement to walk into a polling station and cast a ballot.