The Harris campaign claimed that 75,000 attended Harris’s “closing argument” speech at the Ellipse Tuesday night.
Neither the National Park Service, which allocates the permits, nor the Metropolitan Police Department could verify the campaign’s claim, with the NPS saying in a statement that due to the “difficulty in accurately assessing crowd size for large events,” the agency does not make crowd estimates and leaves it up to the organizers to “make a determination of their event attendance.”
The MPD also told the Washington Examiner it does not provide crowd estimates.
The permit filled out by Harris’s campaign estimated a total of 40,000, up from the 7,500 people listed on the first permit application last week and the threshold of 20,000 people updated over the weekend. The group extended the attendance to 40,000 earlier on Tuesday, with MPD Chief Pamela Smith estimating more than 50,000 people to show up.
