Living while Black is a struggle. Our Black communities fight to be seen and heard in many aspects of life. We fought to be treated as humans and have our basic human rights respected. We fought to be a part of communities and to gain voting rights. We continue to challenge racial barriers and systemic inequality that still strip us of our civil rights and liberties to this day.
The Civil Rights Movement in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were giant steps forward for Black communities. The Voting Rights Act enabled Black people the right to register to vote and banned tactics that had for too-long kept Black people from ballot box.
However, the work done then has not fully protected the Black vote today. Nearly 60 years later, inequitable practices continue to negatively impact the Black vote.
Redistricting is still a tactic used to suppress Black and Latine voters. In Colorado, a state with some of the most robust voter protections in place, district lines were diluting the Black and Latine vote in one of the state's larger counties. El Paso County’s maps historically disenfranchised Black and Latine voters and in 2023, the ACLU of Colorado, along with community partners, put an end to the practice. El Paso County Commissioners adopted a fair map that will finally allow voters of color to use their voices and exercise their rights in future elections after receiving pressure from the ACLU and our partners.
A recent report from the Sentencing Project shows that racial disparities in incarceration are also diluting the political voice of people of color in Colorado. According to the report, Black Coloradans are banned from voting at a rate seven times that of white Coloradans due to imprisonment. This year, a new law, SB-72 — Voting for Confined Eligible Electors, passed in Colorado that requires all 61 jails and detention centers in the state to do in-person voting for general elections. The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, a local non-profit that is a trusted partner of the ACLU of Colorado, led the charge behind this legislation to give eligible voters expanded access to their right to vote while incarcerated which should help to close that gap.
Our vote is our power, yet a large number of Black voters are not using it, many due to the barriers they face in accessing their voting rights.
In 2020, it was reported in Colorado that our racial gap in voter turnout sits at 18.7% which is six points greater than the national average. It was also reported by the African American Research Collaborative in 2022 that on average the Black community has a higher voting rate in the Presidential elections than any other that effect Colorado directly.
In the most recent research, the U.S Census Bureau reported that in 2022, Black voters were underrepresented by 1.6 percentage points nationally which is a greater underrepresentation for this group than in the previous three congressional elections.
Colorado’s Black voters must have a say in issues important to their community such as racial justice, privacy and technology — which has a reputation of error when it comes to facial recognition in people of color — and criminal justice reform because, historically, the system has disproportionately targeted communities of color.
Ballot measures can result in life altering decisions for Colorado’s communities of color and that is why the vote of every Coloradan is vital.
