As the 2020 presidential election comes down to the wire, it’s clear that Black women continue to be the Democratic Party’s most powerful voting group.
Not only did 91% of Black women vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden according to NBC News exit poll results, but Black women have also been on the front lines of this year’s election, working to ensure that all eligible voters have their voices heard at the polls.
In Georgia, Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of the state in 2018, has been on the ground to ensure that voter suppression does not dictate the outcome of this year’s election. Two years ago, she lost the gubernatorial race by less than 55,000 votes to Georgia’s now-governor Republican Brian Kemp amid reports of voter suppression in the state. Between 2010 and 2018, it’s reported that Kemp, who served as Georgia’s secretary of state during that time, purged upwards of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, with many voter registrations being cancelled because a person did not vote in the previous election. Additionally, in 2018, 53,000 people had their registrations moved to pending because of the state’s exact match law, which requires handwritten voter registrations to be identical to an individual’s personal documents, The Atlantic reported. Of those 53,000, more than 80% of those registrations belonged to Black voters.