Voter Disenchantment: Many People of Color Feel Disconnected from the Polls

With only days left until Election Day and early voting underway, Floridians are weighing their options. But for many of the nearly one-fifth of Floridians who are Black, elections bring a sense of uncertainty about whether their votes count and whether they’ll face intimidation at the polls. 

“As a Floridian, it’s hard to see my vote as something that truly matters in a red-dominated state, and race does come into play with that,” said Kyla Tolentino, 21, who recently earned a computer science degree from FAU and currently resides in Broward County.

Tolentino is not alone. Many voters of color say they are losing faith in the American voting system and the democratic system overall, due to past barriers to voting and efforts to silence voters of color.

A recent report from the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to reform and defend democracy, revealed that many people of color are losing faith in the U.S. voting system. The report, “Growing Racial Disparities in Voter Turnout, 2008-2022,” shows that the racial turnout gap has been widening over the past decade or more, with voter suppression being a major contributor. 

“I feel like my vote doesn’t make much of a difference in elections,” said Marcos Perez, 26, an exterminator in Broward County. “I feel like when it comes to votes, it’s about who is in power. I feel like the little people’s votes don’t really matter.”

Many Black voters feel especially leery of voter suppression. 

 “Our votes never really seemed to matter in the first place, and this has been going on forever,” said Solomon Coke, an architect who lives in Fort Lauderdale. “They build this democratic system to make us believe that our votes count, but it’s left up to the Electoral College.” Coke, 46, said that while he never felt directly intimidated, laws that seemed to discourage voting in communities of color have been a disincentive. 

“I just didn’t feel the need to cast a vote,” Coke said. “They try to set up barriers and ways to put our votes down.” He said that he does not participate in voting.

Several Black voters interviewed for this article expressed feelings of intimidation and even insignificance concerning their presidential election votes. Voter suppression laws are one of the many barriers that contribute to the widening racial disparity in voter turnout, according to the same Brennan Center study.

Following the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which allowed states to modify voting procedures without obtaining federal consent, laws in multiple states have increased the barriers to voting for people of color. Due to the ruling, 14 states enacted restrictive voting legislation. 

The report goes on to state that strict voter ID laws can contribute to feelings of voter insecurity among people of color, as the laws disproportionately impact voters of color who may not have the necessary identification. Another issue is restrictions on Sunday voting because many people of color vote on that day, sometimes going in groups after attending church in Souls to the Polls efforts. States like Georgia and Texas have implemented these changes, ultimately to the detriment of voters of color, critics say. 

Florida, in particular, has passed a slew of restrictive voting laws in the last few years, which voting rights groups say will make it more difficult for voters to cast ballots and may disproportionately affect voters of color.  “A string of stricter voting laws have passed in Florida since 2020 in which Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP-led Florida Legislature have reduced drop box numbers and access, increased ID regulations, restricted how many other ballots a person can mail in or drop off besides their own, required voters to request absentee or vote-by-mail ballots twice as often as before, and drastically increased requirements and penalties for third-party voter registration groups, making them ineffective,” C.A. Bridges, a reporter for the USA Today Network Florida, wrote in a recent summary of the ways in which Florida has made it more difficult to vote.  

DeSantis has said that the changes were necessary to have secure and accurate elections.

A report by Democracy Docket, a news platform dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections in the courts, outlined tactics that have been used to scare away Black voters in recent years. Two right-wing conspiracy theorists, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, created robocalls to discourage voters from voting by mail. They spread disinformation, telling voters that their personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to collect outstanding debt. 

Federal law states that “A person may not directly or indirectly use or threaten to use force, violence, or intimidation or any tactic of coercion or intimidation to induce or compel an individual to: Vote or refrain from voting; Vote or refrain from voting for any particular individual or ballot measure.”

 It also states, “It's a third-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000, and against federal law.”

However, Tolentino, who will be voting for the first time, said she still feels intimidated based on living in a predominantly red state. 

“I definitely do feel voter intimidation,” said Tolentino. “Most of Florida's demographics are consistent with older white men, who tend to have a backward way of thinking.” Tolentino is registered and voting in person, but she declined to say who she is voting for. “With that mindset, there tends to be a lot of discrimination [of minorities] where they still view us as people who don’t deserve to vote and want to go backward to a time when women, people of color and other parties couldn’t have the right to vote,” she continued.

She also added, “This election does stress me out; we’ve experienced so many crises happening where Trump was almost assassinated, Biden dropping out and Kamala having to take over in Biden’s place within a short amount of time left to campaign for herself.”

Another FAU student noted the long history of discrimination against Black voters. Voting based on racial discrimination only became illegal in the US with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

“There’s always been a doubt in the Black community about voting. When results don’t go the way the majority of the community wants…people tend to get pessimistic,” said Zion Cooper, a 21-year-old senior at FAU.

“Voter intimidation doesn’t look the same as it looked in the Jim Crow era,” added Cooper, who is from Miami and plans to vote early. “It looks a bit different in ways that are more systematic. It looks like laws...in Georgia not allowing campaigns to hand out water. It looks like voting booths and voting stations being further away from people, that’s more of what it looks like. It definitely falls in the line of making it harder to vote, and it can be intimidating to vote because these are the systems in the way.”