Black voters may be moving more toward mail-in ballots
RALEIGH, N.C. — Shirley Dixon-Mosley never had sent a ballot through the mail. She always treasured casting her ballot in person. But for November’s election, she voted early and by mail because she didn’t want to take any chances.
“I want to make sure my vote got in and it counted,” said the 75-year-old retired teacher’s aide in Charlotte, N.C.
Black voters are among the least likely to vote by mail nationally, but there are early signs they are changing their behavior as the shadow of the coronavirus hangs over the presidential race. The evidence is clearest in North Carolina, the first state in the nation to send out mail-in ballots and where voting has been underway for almost three weeks. But there are hints in other battleground states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.
In North Carolina, Black voters cast 16.7 percent of the more than 173,000 ballots returned so far, a jump from the 9 percent of mail votes cast by Black voters in 2016. They are 21 percent of North Carolina’s registered voters.
“They’re changing their dynamics,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., who tracks state elections. “It seems like there’s a shift going on which will certainly help Democrats.”
But the numbers also come with a warning sign. North Carolina’s Black voters are four times more likely than whites to have their ballots not yet accepted because of missing witness information. Just under 5 percent of absentee ballots returned by Black voters have missing witness information or are in the process of having ballot requirements corrected, compared with just 1.3 percent of ballots returned by white voters.
Alarmed by the figures, Democratic-leaning groups already are shifting their messaging to help Black voters resolve the witness requirements. North Carolina made this process easier Tuesday, settling a lawsuit from the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans seeking to ease absentee guidelines on the state’s witness component. County boards of elections now mail an affidavit for a voter to return to resolve ballot problems. Both Republicans on the state’s five-person Board of Elections resigned after the settlement.
“There’s been a big push to get Black voters to use the option of vote by mail,” said Adrianne Shropshire of VoteBlackPac, one of several groups trying to boost the use of mail-in ballots among Black voters. The group sent absentee ballot applications to 400,000 North Carolina voters. “The problems that people are having is related to the fact that this is new to people.”
Voters have until Nov. 12 to correct their ballots and get them received by their local county elections board.
The North Carolina Democratic Party and Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign have established hot lines for confused voters. Both groups also have volunteers working on the ground to help people remedy witness issues.
Black voters traditionally have preferred to vote inperson and see their ballot being accepted, a certainty sought after generations of voter suppression, discrimination and fighting to win the right to vote. In 2018, only 11 percent of African American voters cast their ballots by mail, compared with 24 percent of white voters, according to the census.
But Black people have been disproportionately killed by the coronavirus, and many older Black Americans now are trying to balance safety with their rights, said Marcus Bass, an activist with the group Advance Carolina.
“The most faithful bloc of voters are older Black voters,” Bass said.