Black Voter Participation in Georgia Has Steadily Increased for Decades

While Democrats pushing to federalize national elections have once again turned their attention to Georgia, painting it as a key state in a Republican-led conspiracy to disenfranchise minority voters nationwide, Georgia election data going back 25 years show little evidence that black and minority voters are having a harder time voting in the state.

In fact, over the last seven presidential elections — 1996 to 2020 — blacks have become a larger share of the electorate, they have registered to vote at a higher rate than whites, and the percentage of black voters who actually cast ballots has increased in all but one election, according to a National Review analysis of Georgia election data.

In their efforts to sell their latest voting bills to the public, prominent Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have repeatedly claimed that nothing less than democracy is at stake. The U.S. Senate is expected to debate and vote on the Democrats’ voting-rights bills today.

They also have repeatedly mischaracterized provisions of the 2021 Georgia voting law, which Biden has referred to as a new iteration of Jim Crow. In a speech in Atlanta last week, Biden suggested that anyone who doesn’t support the Democrats’ plan to approve a “carve out” of a legislative filibuster to pass his party’s “voting rights” agenda is on the side of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. Republicans, he said, “want chaos to reign.”

“To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem,” Biden said.

But Georgia election data going back 25 years don’t show much evidence that minorities are having more problems registering to vote or casting ballots in the state.

According to the data, there were about 930,000 registered black voters in Georgia in 1996, accounting for about 24 percent of the state’s electorate. That year, slightly more than 497,000 black voters cast ballots in the November election, or about 53 percent.

As the state has grown, the number of registered voters overall — and the number of black voters in particular — has increased for every presidential election. In November 2020, there was a record 7.6 million registered voters in the state of Georgia, of which about 2.3 million were black, or about 30 percent. Just shy of 1.4 million of those registered black voters cast ballots, or about 60 percent.

The data also show that black voters have consistently registered to vote at higher rates than white voters over the last 25 years. For example, between 2012 and 2016, the number of registered black voters increased by 39 percent, from roughly 1.5 million to just over 2 million. During that same four-year period, the number of white voters increased about 20 percent.

Over the full, 25-year period, the number of registered white voters has increased 43 percent, while the number of registered black voters has more than doubled.

Since 1996, the percentage of registered black voters who cast ballots has increased, presidential election over presidential election, in every year but one.

In 2000, about 63 percent of registered black voters cast a ballot, a roughly 10 percentage point increase from 1996. In 2004, about 72 percent of registered black voters cast ballots, and in 2008 — Barack Obama’s first presidential election — 75 percent of registered black voters cast ballots, a high point in the last 25 years.

Voter turnout plunged in 2012 for almost all groups, but rebounded in 2016 and 2020, when 56 percent and 60 percent of registered black voters cast ballots, respectively.

Hispanic, Asian, and Native-American voters also represent an increasingly larger share of Georgia’s electorate. Those groups comprised less than 2 percent of Georgia’s electorate in 2000, but now are about 17 percent, according to the state election data.

White voters still represent the largest share of the Georgia electorate, or about 53 percent, and they tend to cast ballots at a slightly higher rate than black voters. About 73 percent of registered white voters cast ballots in November 2020, according to the election data.

An August report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution analyzing federal election data found that 95 percent of Georgia’s citizens over 18 are registered to vote, one of the highest voter registration rates in the country. Voter registration in the state jumped from 76 percent in 2016 to 95 percent in 2020. That increase was primarily driven by that state’s automatic voter-registration program, launched in September 2016, the Journal-Constitution found. That program automatically signs people up to vote when they fill out driver’s-license forms, unless they check a box to opt out.

In an interview with National Review last week ahead of Biden’s voting-rights speech in Atlanta, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger pointed to record high numbers of voters registering and casting ballots as evidence that his state’s elections are fair and open to all eligible voters. Georgia is a national leader in voting access and election security, he said. The Heritage Foundation recently ranked Georgia’s elections the most trustworthy in the country.

Georgia’s new voting law actually increased early voting days to 17, left no-excuse absentee voting in place, and changed the way election workers verify absentee ballots, moving away from a more subjective signature-match process to requiring ID numbers from driver’s licenses, free voter IDs, or other documents.

Raffensperger accused Democrats of destroying voter confidence ahead of the 2022 midterms.

“That’s not helpful for American democracy,” said Raffensperger, who has similarly pushed back against election-fraud claims by Stacey Abrams and former President Donald Trump. “We don’t need further polarization.”

In his speech last week in Atlanta, Biden acknowledged the progress black and other minority voters have made in Georgia. “You’ve built a broad coalition of voters: black, white, Latino, Asian American, urban, suburban, rural, working class, and middle class. And it’s worked. You’ve changed the state by bringing more people legally to the polls.”

But he accused Republicans in the state of “putting up obstacles” to make it harder for minorities to vote. However, Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly mischaracterized several provisions in Georgia’s election-security bill passed last year.

For example, during his speech last week, Biden said that “when the Bible teaches us to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, the new Georgia law actually makes it illegal . . . to bring your neighbors, your fellow voters food or water while they wait in line to vote.”

But the provision of the law in question targets a real problem called line-warming, when candidates or other partisans approach voters waiting in line to vote with freebies — food, drinks, or other gifts. The Georgia law doesn’t bar giving voters food or drinks, it just clarifies where it can be done — 150 feet from a polling location entrance, and 25 feet from the line. And the provision was modeled on a similar New York law.

Biden and other Democrats also have accused Republicans of creating long lines at the polls, ignoring that elections in Georgia are administered locally, and that the communities that have had the biggest problems with long lines tend to be run by Democrats. Georgia’s new voting law actually requires counties with long lines on Election Day to add voting equipment or split the precinct if there are too many voters.

Last year, the Washington Post’s fact-checkers awarded Biden “Four Pinocchios” — the paper’s worst rating — for his false claim that Georgia’s new election law “ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” But the law made no changes to Georgia’s 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Election Day voting hours. Instead, the law required early voting sites to be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Democrats also have complained about Georgia’s strict photo ID requirement to vote in person. However, study after study has shown that photo- ID requirements don’t suppress voting, and Georgia’s voting numbers have increased since the state began requiring IDs to vote.