By Tashi McQueen
AFRO Political Writer
tmcqueen@afro.com
Terri Sewell holding Black Voters Matter sign on Election Day 2020. Photo courtesy of NNPA Newswire
A new report shows that roughly 25 million Black and Latino voters are out of reach when it comes to communicating essential information during crucial election years.
The report, titled “Surfacing Missing Voters: Addressing Data Systems, Tools, and Engagement Models that Invisibilize Black and Brown Communities,” aims to shed light on how voters of color are disenfranchised in political elections.
Miriam McKinney Gray, author of the report, is founder and CEO of the research and data analytics company, McKinney Gray Analytics. Gray worked with the Democracy and Power Innovation Fund (DPI) to create the report.
“According to my estimates, based on U.S. Census data and on a recent Stanford study, 24.76 million Black and Latino eligible voters are currently missing or listed with incorrect
information in voter databases sold by vendors, making them effectively unreachable,” said Gray, in the report’s executive summary. “While 40 percent of Black and Latino people are invisible to voter outreach efforts, only 18 percent of White people are missing or mislisted.”
This information is increasingly critical as the country faces crucial local and national elections this year.
Gray offers several solutions to the problem in the report.
“Philanthropic investments directed at surfacing missing voters will be necessary to increase
community-based data collection, support organizational engagement in antiracist modeling and bolster efforts to build better community-based strategies,” said Gray.
She argues that voter outreach organizations are currently relying on incomplete data or voter file matching systems that are unable to draw accurate conclusions about large groups of people and need to be more diligent about what they use to connect with voters.
“As our lives continue to skew toward virtual and data-driven reality, it becomes more
pressing to address data systems that have proven to be biased against Black and
Brown people,” said Gray.
Within the next six months, Gray recommends that organizing and voter engagement groups focus on reaching Black and Brown communities by cleaning up and completing their membership databases and designing programs that use same-day registration.
For donors, she suggests they invest in programs that are targeting and identifying missing
voters and ask the programs they invest in how they are locating and appealing to missing voters.
In the long term, Gray recommends that donors and voter engagement groups invest in community oversight of widely used data models, enable anti-racist modeling practices and embrace new metrics to measure their impact on connecting with voters.
“The people unseen by voter files are still capable, if organized, to make moves and wield their latent power,” said Joy Cushman, senior advisor to DPI. “People deemed ‘low propensity’ by models and the political industry are defying the odds and still turning out to vote. And many are doing even more than that: they are becoming active members and leaders in power-building organizations, mobilizing their friends and family to vote as well.”
The full report is available here.
Tashi McQueen is a Report For America corps member.
