DCentric

Making up 10% of the voting electorate can’t meant that only 10% of registered African Americans voted. ~ 90 odd million people, so 10% of that is approximately 9 million voting African Americans. Voter participation in this midterm election was supposed to be 42%, so if 90 million = 42%, the total eligible voter pool was 214 million, and 13% of that means there are probably 27 – 28 million registered African Americans. 9 million out of 27 million is much closer to 32- 33% participation rate, not a measly 4.7%. That’s pretty comparable to the general rate of 42%, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the discrepancy is due to being disproportionately burdened by the factors that depress voting for the less than wealthy. It’s a working day, not a holiday, there’s no childcare, and polls are often hard to get to–all things we should fix. ( I got my statistics on the voting numbers from this AP article by Matthew Daly.). According to Wikipedia In 2000 there were 36 million African Americans in the united states, so assuming growth was steady, there are about 40 million *now*. Many of those people are under the age of 18, so they can’t vote, so that means over all participation was AT LEAST 25%. That strikes me as pretty respectable–especially when you consider wide spread evidence that African Americans have been disproportionately and unfairly disenfranchised b/c of the discrepancy in felony status laws regarding the use of crack vs. the use of cocaine, not to mention other less clearcut kinds of unfairness in the criminal justice system.

Moral of the story: we need more numeracy in all of our communities. Support the Algebra Project.

In the above analysis of the over all participation rate (i.e. voters/eligible voters, not voters/*registered* voters) I’m assuming all African-Americans the census counts as such are citizens, which might be a more reasonable assumption than for any other ethnic group except I don’t think the census differentiates between century+ African-Americans and more recent immigrants. So the over all participation rate in the ‘indigenous’ African-American community might be much higher than 25%.

I found some more specific numbers and came up with an estimate that 34% of African American adults voted yesterday:

http://studentactivism.net/2010/11/03/did-only-4-7-of-blacks-vote-yesterday/

i would say “wow”, but i’m not surprised. i employ numbers in my posts/comments a lot, and i’ve become very careful about typos by decimal places: usually people actually don’t correct the error!

I hate that people automatically believe things they read on the internet. So, so sad.

Is the source of the rumor known?

The CBS article referred to in the above post stated 10% of blacks are votING… I suspect it was just a typo on the twitterer’s part.

That original stat is really bizarrely inaccurate. Just to add to Saheli’s comment, it’s a completely different thing to say that African Americans comprised 10% of the electorate versus only 10% of African Americans voted. If only 10% of African Americans voted, that would mean they’d comprise a much tinier percentage of the electorate that showed up. There are 310 million Americans and African Americans comprise just under 12.7% of that or 39.6 mn (see 2009 population data on the Census Factfinder site at http://goo.gl/zO40V). Minors are roughly 25% of that total. So if 9 million African American adults voted out of a total of 28 mn registered AA voters, the 30-odd % participation should be about right. We should strive to make that higher but it’s no where near the levels originally alleged.

your credit on the illustration is incorrect, it was art directed by http://www.twitter.com/bfnh

Thank you so much for pointing that out! I am sorry for the error. I will change it to @bfnh.

np. thanks for the edit.