In the run-up to Ohio’s voter registration deadline Tuesday, civil rights advocates and Democrats have aggressively pushed for high voter turnout among blacks, a voting block that could decide the national election.
African-Americans and low-income residents are the least likely to vote and, records show, the most likely to be adversely affected when the state decides who gets absentee ballot applications mailed to their homes and who gets removed from its voter registry for not voting often enough.
Democrats know that the black vote is critical to delivering Ohio’s 18 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton. The voting block carried President Barack Obama to victory in Ohio, twice, shattering turnout records each time.
And there’s no indication that African-Americans will switch their voting preference this election.
George W. Bush received 16 percent of the black vote in 2004, according to exit polls. The next two GOP nominees, John McCain and Mitt Romney, received 2 and 4 percent of the black vote, respectively.
Multiple polls put Republican nominee Donald Trump on pace to get 3 percent or less of the African-American vote in Ohio.
In late September, four of the 13 members of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus traveled to Akron to lay out the stakes in this election.
Led by Democratic Reps. Alicia Reece of Cincinnati and Emilia Sykes of Akron, the group made voting a civil rights issue.
“It’s really what this election is all about — our heritage, our history,” said Reece, who spoke at Legends Barber Shop on Exchange Street.
Reece questioned the removal of millions of Ohio voters in the past few years. The process, known as purging, keeps the state voting rolls clean and free of confusion on Election Day, reducing the risk of voter fraud, Secretary of State Jon Husted has argued.
Reece likened the purging to the loss of voting rights after the Civil War. “Then,” she said, “people were set on fire, beat down, lynched trying to go vote.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit overturned the purging, telling a lower court to correct the situation though not necessarily by Election Day. This means some voters purged for their inactivity may show up to vote in vain.
A Beacon Journal analysis of election data shows that 22,994 voters were removed from the rolls last year in Summit County. More than half (11,748) had an Akron address, even though the city accounts for only 37 percent of the county’s population.
“They’ve erased us off the rolls,” Reece said. “Now we went to court and they’ve held that it’s not constitutional, but we don’t really even know if it’s going to be reinstated. It’s a mess and we ain’t got but a couple weeks.”
Voting leverage
Raymond Greene Jr., a black minister who founded My Brother’s Keeper, a restorative justice program in Akron, said voting is “our voice.”
“It’s one of the few things we can leverage,” he said.
A former felon, Greene said blacks in depressed neighborhoods are most concerned about racial tension and criminal justice this election. Black men are arrested 2.3 times more often than whites, a disparity that swelled during the war on crime in the 1990s. Black schoolchildren are expelled or suspended two to four times more often than whites, the Beacon Journal has found in reviewing state education records.
Reece and her colleagues at the Statehouse are pushing for a constitutional amendment to protect voting rights and legislation to reform the justice system through the use of police body cameras, independent prosecutors and more transparent rules for the grand jury indictment process.
But black residents, Greene said, don’t see voting as a realistic agent of change.
It took a decade “out of the [criminal justice] system” for Greene to believe in the power of electing judges, prosecutors and a president who gets to appoint several Supreme Court justices in the next four years.
Mailed out
Earlier this month, Greene joined 100 volunteers asked by Akron NAACP President Judith Hill to knock on doors in West Akron, the Firestone Park area and South Akron.
They registered voters, checked voting statuses and encouraged participation.
“It’s good to engage in conversations with those people because the biggest thing is to find out why people don’t vote,” Greene, a community activist with Akron Organizing Collaborative, said of the door-knocking campaign. “Most don’t feel they have a place in the system.”
The neighborhoods Hill and the volunteers canvassed have lower-than-average voter turnout and a disproportionate number of inactive voters. Because it’s unclear if many still live at their last known address, Husted decided not to mail 5,503 of them absentee ballot applications reminding them how to vote from home.
Some voters told Greene they didn’t think they could vote because of a felony or that casting a ballot would lead to jury duty. Neither are true.
Doug Livingston can be reached at 330-996-3792 or dlivingston@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow on Twitter: @ABJDoug.