Stacked barchart, bottom parameter triggers Error: Shape mismatch: objects cannot be broadcast to a single shape
if you change your code to the following:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

columns = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'j']
pos = np.arange(9)
var_one = np.array([40348, 53544, 144895, 34778, 14322, 53546, 33623, 76290, 53546])
var_two = np.array([15790, 20409, 87224, 22085, 6940, 27099, 17575, 41862, 27099])
var_three = np.array([692, 3254, 6645, 1237, 469, 872, 569, 3172, 872])

plt.bar(pos, np.add(np.add(var_three, var_two), var_one), color='yellow', edgecolor='yellow')
plt.bar(pos, np.add(var_two, var_one), color='purple', edgecolor='purple')
plt.bar(pos, var_one, color='green', edgecolor='green')
plt.xticks(pos, columns)
plt.show()


The result will be like this: