Why voter turnout is declining in Akron's predominantly Black neighborhoods
By Seyma Bayram and Doug Livingston
Published in the Akron Beacon Journal, December 4, 2020 (Click here to view on news site).
Rodney Dennis has persuaded hundreds of customers to fill out voter registration forms at his barber shops in Akron. But since 2016, the young Black men in his barber’s chair have increasingly expressed a complete lack of confidence in the democratic process.
“It’s definitely a change. … A lot of people don’t even want to go vote,” Dennis said. “A lot of people do feel like there’s voter suppression.”
Undaunted by the disenchantment, the Army veteran is in a political battle to educate and empower his community. And he’s losing ground.
For a second straight presidential election, turnout in Akron's predominantly Black wards is down — even as Ohio and the nation set new voting records.
Since 2012, turnout has fallen 15 percentage points in Ward 3 (Summit Lake and Sherbondy Hill), 10 points in Ward 5 (East and South Akron and Cascade Valley) and 7 points in Ward 4 (West Akron). Each of the three city wards has so many Black voters that splitting any one of them after the 2010 Census could have been considered a violation of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The drops have been relatively consistent. Turnout fell from 65% in the three wards combined when President Barack Obama won Ohio in 2012 to 59% when President Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton and 55% when Joe Biden also lost Ohio but won the national election this fall.
Together, the three wards cast 4,498 fewer votes in 2020 than they did in 2012, despite having only 699 fewer registered voters.
For community organizers like Dennis who push people to vote, the results are concerning.
“I think it’s part of my duty and my obligation to kind of persuade [them],” he said. “I don’t make it my business to see who they’re going to vote for, what party they’re going to pick. I’m more toward how important voting is and, you know, how it can affect people, affect families, affect change. It might not change anything now, but you know, our kids, and our kids’ kids … your vote does matter."
A Democratic Party official, council members representing the three wards, progressive activists in the Black community and the Akron NAACP give various reasons for the depressed turnout: political disillusionment, a virus that disproportionately kills and hospitalizes Black people — and that devastated the effective door-knocking voter campaigns — a distrust in mail-in balloting, long lines at the early voting center and the stubborn cycle of poverty.
Dennis pointed out that state law upheld by the Ohio’s top election official limited Summit County and its 380,000 registered voters to just one drop box for absentee ballots. Many residents who lack personal transportation live too far to walk to the single downtown collection point, he said.
“If I’m catching a bus, it could take me hours to get there, or say if I’m that single mom who’s got to work all day… I got kids to take care of, the kids are not in school (because of the pandemic)… then try to get there to vote,” Dennis said.
“It’s just so much more difficult to vote and to be excited to go vote,” he said.
When the dust settled on the 2020 presidential election, it became clear that Biden would lose Ohio, badly. Like Clinton, Biden sealed a primary victory with strong support from Black voters. But enthusiasm in the general election dissipated in urban counties with cities like Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton and Youngstown. Together, turnout in these reliably Democratic counties has flatlined from 71.3% in 2012 to 72% in 2020 as turnout in the rest of Ohio soared from 69.8% to 76%, with Trump capitalizing.
Within Summit County, turnout fell in only Akron (down 1.13 percentage points) and Munroe Falls (off 0.21 points) compared to four years ago. Boston Township turnout also slipped, but not when considering the shift in registered voters to Boston Heights, which election officials believe may be due to new homes built there.
Leaders elected to represent Akron’s racially diverse communities say the pandemic killed turnout by raising legitimate health concerns about standing in long lines to vote early and sidelining the door-knocking campaigns that traditionally mobilize minority voters.
“I think it’s a couple of different things,” said Council President Margo Sommerville, whose Ward 3 includes Summit Lake, Sherbondy Hill and part of West Akron — three of the six Akron neighborhoods where most residents are Black. (The other majority Black neighbors are Cascade Valley, Downtown and East Akron — all in Ward 5.)
According to the county health department, 17% of Black residents, compared to 10% of white residents, infected by the coronavirus developed symptoms severe enough to end up at a hospital. Statewide, Black residents are hospitalized or killed by the virus in greater proportions than their share of overall population. And they tend to live in lower income communities with a greater prevalence of preexisting health conditions and higher uninsured rates, which health officials think could lead to an under-reporting of cases.
“I do believe COVID played a big part in Ward 5’s turnout,” Councilwoman Tara Samples said. “There was no door-to-door, which does help build excitement.
"We’ve not seen anything like this in many of our lifetimes,” she said. “And I do believe within the minority communities, they are fearful.”
Anecdotally, some Black voters didn’t see themselves or their concerns represented in either major candidate, said Councilman Russ Neal, who represents West Akron.
“I’m just going by what I heard, and I heard that more from the younger voting population, not the stalwart voters,” said Neal. “But I don’t have any true hard data outside of casual conversations with people.”
As a self-contained city ward, West Akron is 82% Black. The wedge-shaped residential neighborhood had the second highest turnout among the city’s 10 wards in 2012 before being overtaken by Ward 6 in 2016 (the only ward Trump ever won) and again by Ward 1 in 2020.
The shifting turnout resulted in Biden underperforming in an urban core needed in a big way to be competitive in Ohio.
“This may surprise you,” said Neal, “but I had more than a couple conversations with people who did not like Trump, but they did like what he did for their wallet. They would say: ‘He’s not good for my politics, but he’s good for my wallet.’ That came from a ward that you would not think it would come from.”
‘We have to make voting transformational’
Rosanne Winter, president of the League of Women Voters for the Akron area, is concerned about turnout dropping for some while rising for everyone else.
“I say it’s really that they don’t feel it’s working for them, why bother? Now, we had bigger turnout than ever before, so we convinced more people to be part of the process, but there are people who feel it’s too late, it’s too much. Why bother?” Winter explained.
She pointed to the lack of significant progress to address and overturn systemic issues like poverty and lack of investment in Akron’s Black communities.
“A lot of these areas are subject to the redlining that happened, and their neighborhoods have deteriorated. We’re seeing buildings being torn down. So, there are a number of issues in these wards that are slowly being addressed, but it still doesn’t leave them with a great deal of ‘Oh if I vote, it’s going to make a difference',” she added.
Among the possible concerns, voter intimidation is a major issue in Ohio, Winter said.
“This year, I think people were afraid of intimidation at the polls in person. And the Black population, more so than the white, loves voting in person. It’s like a rite of passage. They remember fighting for that vote,” she said.
Difficulties in voting absentee, distrust in the U.S. Postal Service and a lack of convenient transportation could have contributed to the low turnout, she added.
“We know of several multi dwellings in those areas that do not pick up mail. So you will get mail, but they won’t pick it up, so you have to take it somewhere,” Winter said, adding that mailing envelopes may cost only a couple stamps but can be prohibitive if you can't get to the post office or a full-service grocery store to buy the stamps.
Executive Director of the Freedom Bloc Ray Greene agrees that Black Akron residents may feel politically discouraged by insignificant economic and social improvements in their communities.
“The overall feeling of ‘my life doesn’t change’ also plays into it. You know, ‘neither of these presidents is going to do anything for me, so why should I vote?’ And then when nobody is knocking on those people’s doors to really help them understand, I think that plays a huge part also,” Greene said.
“There’s nothing in it for people to go to the polls. It’s transactional. It’s not transformational and we have to make voting transformational,” he said.
Greene, like others, pointed to subtle forms of voter suppression.
“When you refuse to put more drop boxes out, that becomes voter suppression. When you only have one early voting location and the line is an hour-long line, that’s voter suppression,” he said. Early in-person voters countywide waited up to three hours at times.
But COVID-19 was the biggest deterrent to voter engagement, Greene said.
“This year was just extremely difficult. Not being able to knock on doors, not being able to invest in messaging, for the Black community, and I think it showed in the polls,” he said.
He stressed the importance of political education that starts in grade school. Robust efforts to register new must keep pressure on them to actually vote.
“There was a lot of money given to Black organizations to register Black people to vote,” Greene said of the 2020 general election. “There wasn’t a lot of money given to Black organizations to turn black people out. Those are two different conversations."
A numbers problem
Depressed turnout in Akron's predominantly Black wards can also be explained, at least in part, by math: newly registered voters didn’t vote and wards 3, 4 and 5 disproportionately cast provisional ballots, which are used when a regular ballot is denied.
All but Ward 3, which now has 159 fewer registered voters than four years ago, saw increases in voter registrations from 2016 to 2020. But wards 3, 4 and 5 were the only to cast fewer votes in the 2020 general election, compared to 2016.
The net impact of having more registered voters and fewer ballots crushed turnout in these predominantly Black wards. Total ballots cast fell by 14% in ward 3 from 6,873 in 2016 to 5,939 in 2020 and 10% in ward 5 from 6,010 to 5,408. Only Ward 4 also saw a decline in total ballots cast, albeit by a mere 43 votes.
Akron redrew its ward boundaries following the 2010 Census and will do so again in the next couple years. Majority-minority wards 3, 4 and 5 were kept intact then, and probably will be again, per the Voting Rights Act.
Though each held about 20,000 residents, some of the new wards began the decade with more political clout. Most notably, voters in West and Northwest Akron cast between 10,772 and 13,206 ballots each in 2012 while wards 3 and 5 cast only 8,265 and 6,737 ballots, respectively.
Over the course of the decade, ballots cast fell by 28% in ward 3 and 20% in Ward 5. Ward 8 now casts twice as many ballots as either of these majority-minority city wards.
Poverty, transiency and housing instability are common where voters lacked adequate identification, gave outdated addresses or weren't in the poll book — either because they never registered or were unregistered legally or illegally for not voting often enough.
Across Summit County, 7,104 provisional ballots were cast in the 2020 general election. That's 25 provisional ballots for every 1,000 tallied votes. In Akron, the ratio was 36 per 1,000 votes.
But in Ward 3, there were 58 provisional ballots cast for every 1,000 voters counted. Similarly, Ward 5 saw 56 provisional ballots per 1,000 votes counted. These rates are more than double the county average.
These provisional ballots were just as likely to be accepted as valid, but the fact that they were needed so often speaks to the challenges facing marginalized voters, especially low-income renters who move often. There may be no clearer example than the 26 residents of wards 3 and 4 who accounted for nearly half of all Akronites allowed to vote provisionally because a court order determined that they and others across Ohio had been illegally purged from voter rolls by the state.