Thursday, Yahoo News published a piece by Chris Riotta of International Business Times (IBT) titled “Hillary Clinton Gets More Votes Than Any Candidate Ever.” In the article, Riotta wrote (emphasis added):
“Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has garnered at least 65,527,625 votes in the 2016 presidential election, the most any presidential candidate has ever received and over 2.6 million more than the president-elect, who has received at least 62,851,436 votes, according to figures released Wednesday by The Cook Report, a nonpartisan election analysis organization. Clinton now has a margin of more than two percent of the popular vote majority than Trump, as states like Florida and California continue to submit ballots from primarily Democratic-held regions like Miami and Los Angeles.”
Screenshot via Yahoo News
Oops.
Hillary Clinton is currently 3,971,803 votes shy of having the most votes of any candidate ever. In 2008, Barack Obama garnered 69,499,428 votes. As it stands, Clinton even lags behind Obama’s 2012 haul of 65,915,795 votes by approximately 388,000 votes.
It takes a 60-second Google search to get presidential vote totals for elections dating back decades.
A triumphant article from an allegedly reputable news source such as Yahoo stating that “Hillary Clinton [Got] More Votes Than Any Candidate Ever” when she’s nearly four million votes shy of that mark is rather embarrassing. One might say it qualifies as fake news.
Yahoo News has since taken the piece down, without so much as issuing a retraction. The article is just gone. There’s no telling how many people saw the Yahoo News piece before it was taken down. Regardless, those who did see the piece may now be under a striking misapprehension.
Chris Riotta has remained silent about the issue on Twitter, only posting an IBTimes piece that’s nearly identical to the Yahoo piece, featuring a different title and more…accurate information.
To be fair, it’s not known if it was Riotta or Yahoo that made the mistake. If it was indeed Riotta, it’s ironic, because the same day the fake story went up, he condemned the writer of the false Pizza-gate story on Twitter:
Newspaper journalists are turning (and furiously typewriting) in their graves https://t.co/HedlvhX13f
— Chris Riotta (@chrisriotta) December 8, 2016
Yahoo is also mentioning the spread of fake news:
Hillary Clinton issues stern warning against spread of fake news: âLives are at riskâ https://t.co/OJ06jXHKjw pic.twitter.com/FC4mCqZA0b
— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) December 9, 2016
Riotta (or the editors at Yahoo) might want to take that 60 seconds next time to make sure their count isn’t off by nearly four million votes.
Source: The Daily Wire
