A rumor circulating on Election Day 2024 claimed that Google displayed a special map showing voting locations when users entered a particular search query that included U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' last name, but not former President Donald Trump's.
For example, X user DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) — an account with nearly 955,000 followers — posted a screen-captured video demonstrating discrepancies in searches for "where can I vote for Harris" versus "where can I vote for Trump."
The user's post (archived) read, "BREAKING: Google shows a 'Where to Vote' section with a map for Kamala Harris, but not for Donald Trump. Google is the biggest corporate donor to the Democratic Party." As of this writing, the post displayed over 18.5 million views. (According to OpenSecrets.org, Google did not appear to be the largest corporate donor to the Democratic Party.)
X owner and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk amplified the rumor, asking in a repost (archived) of DogeDesigner's post, "Are others seeing this too?" Musk's post received an additional 17.2 million views.
However, the truth was less mysterious than it may have seemed at first glance. The special map appeared in Google search results based on users entering what the search engine recognized as a query for the name of a city, county or state. Harris is the name of two counties in Georgia and Texas, according to SimpleMaps.com. According to the same source, Trump is not the name of any cities or counties.
Google clarified the matter in a post from the official X account News from Google (@NewsFromGoogle), explaining that while "Trump" didn't do the trick, identical searches using the surname of Trump's running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, produced a map similar to the one that appeared for Harris. Google posted (archived): "The 'where to vote' panel is triggering for some specific searches bc Harris is also the name of a county in TX. Happens for 'Vance' too bc it's also the name of a county. Fix is coming. Note very few people actually search for voting places this way."
Additional Research
Within seconds of our searches confirming a query using "Harris" produced a map while "Trump" did not, we conducted a similar search inserting the surname of Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. That search also produced no map, a result we expected, given that we found no cities or counties named Stein. (As an interesting counter-example, a search using the surname of independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also displayed no map, even though Kennedy is the name of four locations — either towns or census-designated places — in Alabama, California, Minnesota and New York.)