Volunteer State News

The head of an election organization refutes the idea that African-American voters face suppression when participating in elections in Republican-led states. 

“The times have changed, and that’s a good thing," Ken Cuccinelli, chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and a former Republican attorney general of Virginia, told Morning Answer Chicago. "We are not the nation we were in 1965. We do not have tests and hurdles in place based on your race for people to vote. The turnout reflects it. If you look at this last election there were only two states where you had both higher black voter registration than white and higher black turnout than white. They were Mississippi and Tennessee. The worst state, by far, on those measures was Massachusetts.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Mississippi is one of 36 states requiring voters to show a form of identification at the polls. It is one of seven "strict photo ID" states where voters can't cast a ballot without a photo ID. The others are Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Tennessee. North Carolina's law has a temporary injunction against it. All these states other than Wisconsin voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Massachusetts is one of 14 states (and the District of Columbia) that do not require voter identification at the polls. The others are Maine, Oregon, California, Nevada, Minnesota, Illinois, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey and Maryland, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. All these states other than Nebraska backed Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Although Cuccinelli said that black voter turnout is higher than whites, The Sentencing Project found that minorities face barriers when voting such as the broken criminal justice system, Business Insider reported.

"The most recent comprehensive state-level research from 2016 found that about 6.1 million Americans were disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, with 1 in 13 black Americans, compared to 1 in 56 non-black Americans, nationwide having lost their right to vote due to a felony conviction," Business Insider reported.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board reports that GOP states did not experience lower black turnout in the 2020 election cycle. Turnout among voting-age black citizens was highest in the state of Maryland (75.3%) followed by Mississippi (72.8%). Black voting-age turnout was lowest in the Democratic-led state of Massachusetts (36.4%).

Critics of the recent push for election legislation in Republican-controlled states say the focus should not be on the 2020 election, but how these laws would potentially make it harder for minorities to vote in 2022 and 2024. 

According to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll of 1,115 adults nationwide, 79% of respondents believe voters should be required to show government-issued photo identification whenever they come to the polls.