Voter Suppression Is Real — But 60% of Eligible Black Voters Not Showing Up Is Not Suppression

There is a particular form of intellectual dishonesty that has become so pervasive in Black political discourse that it now functions as a kind of orthodoxy, unexamined and unchallenged, and it is this: the conflation of voter suppression with voter non-participation. These are not the same thing. They are not even close to the same thing. One is an act committed against you by external forces seeking to deny your constitutional rights. The other is a choice — a choice made by millions of eligible Black voters in every election cycle, a choice with devastating consequences for the communities those voters claim to care about, and a choice that no amount of righteous indignation about gerrymandering and voter ID laws can excuse or explain away. We must hold two truths simultaneously, and the refusal to do so is costing us everything.

Let us begin with the suppression, because it is real, it is documented, and anyone who denies it is either ignorant or lying. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, removing the requirement that states and counties with histories of racial discrimination obtain federal approval before changing their voting laws. Within hours — not days, not weeks, hours — of the decision, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had been blocked under preclearance. Within months, states across the South began closing polling places, purging voter rolls, and imposing restrictions that disproportionately affected Black voters. This is not conjecture. It is the documented administrative record of what happened when the guardrails were removed.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights documented the closure of over 1,600 polling places between 2013 and 2020, predominantly in Black and Latino communities. In Georgia, Brian Kemp, while serving as both Secretary of State and candidate for governor, purged over 340,000 voters from the rolls in the months before his 2018 race against Stacey Abrams. In North Carolina, a federal court struck down a voter restriction law, noting that it targeted Black voters with “almost surgical precision.” These are facts. They are supported by court records, federal data, and investigative journalism. Voter suppression is not a conspiracy theory. It is an ongoing, deliberate, well-documented effort to reduce Black political power.

The Number Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

And now here is the other number, the one that gets whispered in private but never spoken in public, the one that every Black political strategist knows and no Black political leader will say: even in states with same-day registration, early voting, no-excuse absentee ballots, and zero documented suppression efforts, Black midterm turnout averages approximately 40%. In off-year local elections — the elections that determine who runs the police department, who sits on the school board, who controls zoning and housing policy — Black turnout drops to between 10 and 15 percent.

Read those numbers again. In the elections that most directly affect the daily lives of Black Americans — the elections that determine whether the cop who patrols your neighborhood receives de-escalation training, whether your child’s school gets adequate funding, whether a developer can bulldoze affordable housing in your community — nine out of ten eligible Black voters stay home. Not because someone stopped them. Not because a poll was closed or an ID was demanded. Because they chose not to show up.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
— Frederick Douglass, 1857

The conflation of these two phenomena — the real and documented suppression efforts that target Black voters, and the voluntary non-participation of the majority of eligible Black voters in most elections — is not merely intellectually dishonest. It is strategically catastrophic. It allows us to externalize responsibility for our own political marginalization. It permits us to blame every electoral loss on the machinations of the opposition rather than confronting the reality that we are forfeiting our own power in the most basic, measurable, and correctable way possible.

What Drives the Non-Participation

Understanding why 60% of eligible Black voters do not participate in midterm elections — and 85 to 90% skip local elections entirely — requires an honest examination of factors that are more uncomfortable than voter ID laws because they implicate us rather than our adversaries. The research identifies several overlapping drivers, none of which are flattering and all of which are addressable.

The first is disillusionment, and it is not irrational. Black communities have been promised transformation by political candidates for decades and have received, in return, symbolic gestures: a holiday here, a proclamation there, a heartfelt speech about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice while the actual arc of policy bends toward whoever showed up to lobby. The gap between political promises and material outcomes is not imaginary. It is measured in the unchanged poverty rates, the persistent wealth gap, and the schools that remain inadequate despite fifty years of Democratic control in most majority-Black cities.

The second driver is the perception that there is no meaningful difference between candidates — a perception that is sometimes accurate and sometimes catastrophically wrong. In a school board race, the difference between a candidate who supports phonics-based literacy instruction and one who does not is the difference between a generation of Black children who can read and one that cannot. But these distinctions require a level of civic knowledge and engagement that our communities have not been equipped to exercise, because the third driver — the absence of civics education — has left most Americans, and Black Americans in particular, unable to identify their local representatives, explain how municipal government works, or articulate what specific policies they want changed.

The Math That Should Change Everything

Here is the arithmetic that every Black community needs to see written on a whiteboard in every church, every barbershop, every community center in America. In most American cities with significant Black populations, 100% Black voter turnout in local elections would produce a fundamentally different political landscape. This is not aspiration. This is mathematics.

Consider the DA races. District attorneys determine prosecution priorities, plea bargaining policies, and whether to pursue charges against officers involved in questionable shootings. In most cities, DA races are decided by a fraction of eligible voters. In a city where Black residents constitute 30% of the population but turn out at 12% in local elections, increasing that turnout to even 50% would swing the election. The same arithmetic applies to school boards, city councils, sheriffs, and judges.

Bernard Fraga’s comprehensive analysis of turnout data across every demographic group in America found that the gap between Black turnout and white turnout in midterm and local elections is not explained by suppression. It is explained by mobilization — or the lack of it. White voters, particularly older white voters, show up for local elections because they have been organized, informed, and motivated by institutions that treat every election as consequential. Black voters, by contrast, have been organized almost exclusively around presidential elections and high-profile Senate races, creating a boom-and-bust cycle that delivers occasional symbolic victories while ceding control of the institutions that actually govern daily life.

The Georgia Model: What Stacey Abrams Built

If the problem seems intractable, Georgia proves it is not. Between 2014 and 2020, Stacey Abrams and the organizations she founded — the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight — executed a strategy that combined all three elements that most voter engagement efforts treat as separate: suppression fighting, voter registration, and turnout mobilization. The New Georgia Project registered over 800,000 new voters. Fair Fight challenged voter purges and poll closures in court. And the ground-level organizing operation treated every voter as an individual who needed to be contacted, informed about what was on the ballot, and given a concrete reason to participate.

The result was a state that had voted Republican in every presidential election since 1992 delivering its electoral votes to Joe Biden in 2020 and electing two Democratic senators in the January 2021 runoff. Georgia did not become a bluer state because its demographics changed. It became a competitive state because the people who already lived there started voting. The Abrams model did not choose between fighting suppression and addressing non-participation. It fought suppression AND built the infrastructure to turn out voters who had been eligible but absent for years.

What makes the Georgia model instructive is not just its success but its replicability. The ingredients are not mysterious: a permanent voter contact operation that does not disband between elections, a legal team that challenges suppression in real time, an educational component that tells voters what is on the ballot and why it matters to their lives, and leadership that treats local elections with the same urgency as presidential races. None of this requires a charismatic national figure. It requires sustained, unglamorous, precinct-level work that most political organizations are unwilling to do because it does not generate headlines or fundraising emails.

The Cost of Conflation

The greatest damage done by conflating suppression with non-participation is that it provides a narrative excuse for inaction. If every electoral failure can be attributed to suppression, then there is no need for self-examination, no need for organizational reform, no need for the difficult conversations about why Black civic engagement collapses between presidential elections. The suppression narrative, when applied to situations where suppression is not the primary factor, functions as a form of learned helplessness — a belief that external forces are so powerful that individual and collective action is futile.

This is precisely the opposite of what our history teaches. The people who marched from Selma to Montgomery were not operating under the illusion that the system was fair. They knew it was rigged. They knew it was violent. They knew it might kill them. And they showed up anyway, because they understood something that too many of us have forgotten: the right to vote is not a gift that retains its value when stored on a shelf. It is a tool that works only when used, and it degrades with every election in which it is not exercised.

What Must Happen Now

The path forward requires three simultaneous commitments, and any organization or leader who is serious about Black political power will pursue all three without treating any of them as optional. First, the fight against voter suppression must continue and intensify. The Shelby County decision remains a catastrophe for voting rights, and the ongoing efforts to close polls, purge rolls, and restrict access must be challenged in every court and every legislature where they appear. This is non-negotiable.

Second, the Black community must build permanent civic infrastructure at the local level. Not election-year operations that materialize in October and vanish in November, but year-round organizations that educate voters about municipal government, track the performance of local officials, and ensure that every eligible voter knows what is on every ballot. The NAACP was once this organization. The Black church was once this institution. Both have largely abdicated this role, and something must fill the vacuum.

Third, and most importantly, we must stop allowing the real injustice of voter suppression to serve as a blanket explanation for the voluntary non-participation that is equally devastating and far more within our control. Both are problems. Both reduce Black political power. But only one of them can be solved entirely by our own decision to act differently. The suppression requires lawyers, legislation, and litigation. The non-participation requires only that we show up.

Frederick Douglass told us that power concedes nothing without a demand. He did not say power concedes nothing without a complaint, or a tweet, or a hashtag, or a well-worded op-ed about the injustice of it all. He said a demand. And a demand, in a democracy, is measured in votes — not in the votes we were prevented from casting, but in the votes we chose not to cast, the elections we chose to sit out, the school board meetings we chose to skip, the local primaries we chose to ignore because nobody famous was on the ballot and nobody made us feel inspired.

Forty-four million Black Americans represent the single largest reliable voting bloc in American politics, concentrated in precisely the swing states and competitive districts that determine national elections. That is not weakness. That is a weapon. But a weapon left in the drawer is no different from no weapon at all, and right now, in every local election in America, that weapon sits unused while the people who showed up — the small number, the organized number, the consistent number — make every decision that will shape our children’s lives for the next decade. We can change this. Not by waiting for the suppression to end, because it may never end. Not by waiting for a candidate who inspires us, because inspiration is a luxury that people with power cannot afford to require. We change it by showing up. Every election. Every time. Not because it feels good, but because the alternative — which we have been living for decades — is what happens when we don’t.