Bay State News

The chairman of the conservative Election Transparency Initiative said in a recent statement that the notion of African-American voter suppression in Republican states is not accurate.

“The times have changed, and that’s a good thing," Ken Cuccinelli said, according to 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 cannot vote without a photo ID. The others are Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Arkansas, Wisconsin and Tennessee. North Carolina's law has a temporary injunction against it.

Tennessee is one of 36 states requiring voters to show a form of identification at the polls, according to National Conference of State Legislatures.

Massachusetts is one of 14 states, along with 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,

Although Cuccinelli, the former GOP attorney general of Virginia, argues that black voter turnout is higher than their white counterparts, there are still barriers that minorities face when voting, such as a broken criminal justice system, according to The Sentencing Project, as reported by Business Insider.

"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," the 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 recent state voter restrictions say the problem of voter suppression lies not with the 2020 elections but with the upcoming 2022 and 2024 elections. 

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