Sixty years ago, civil rights activists seeking to peacefully march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand equal access to the ballot were brutally assaulted by police. The events of what became known as Bloody Sunday were a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a landmark law that successfully protected against racially discriminatory voting policies for decades. The Supreme Court has since hollowed out the law, and data from the 2024 elections shows that activists’ hard-won victories for voting rights are being eroded. In December, a Brennan Center analysis showed that the gap between white and Black voter participation in Georgia grew in 2024; our new analysis shows that the same thing happened in Alabama.
In Alabama’s 2024 elections, the gap between white and Black voter turnout was larger than at any point since at least 2008. The white–Black turnout gap increased to 13 percentage points (up from 9 percentage points in 2022), while the white–nonwhite turnout gap grew to 19 percentage points (up from 13 percentage points). Had Alabama’s eligible nonwhite voters turned out to vote at the same rate as eligible white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast in 2024.
Both the white–Black and white–nonwhite gaps have increased by nearly 50 percent since the 2022 election and were, respectively, 65 and 44 percent larger than in the preceding presidential election. The disparity in turnout rates between Alabama’s white and Black voters grew even as overall voter turnout declined in 2024 compared with the 2020 election. That drop was precipitous for Black voters: Between 2020 and 2024, turnout fell by 6 percentage points for Black voters, compared with only 1 percentage point for white voters.
Black and white turnout rates were considerably closer in the 2008 and 2012 elections. Since then, Black turnout has trended down while white turnout has remained considerably higher. Overall, Black turnout in Alabama is now the lowest it has been since before the Obama era.
We can’t say for certain what caused the white–Black turnout gap to widen in Alabama, but the surge in restrictive voting laws since the Shelby County v. Holder decision has likely played a role in depressing turnout among Black voters. Our research shows that a decade after the ruling gutted the Voting Rights Act, these gaps are growing everywhere, but they are widening especially quickly in places like Alabama that were subject to the “preclearance condition” that was suspended in Shelby County. While we know there are ways to fight the turnout gap — enacting a fairer congressional map in Alabama, for instance, increased turnout for some Black voters in 2024 — the cumulative effect of restrictive voting laws leads to unequal participation.
The loss of voting protections and the growth of the racial turnout gap brings Alabama closer to an ignoble past rather than a democracy equally open to all citizens. The late Rep. John R. Lewis was one of the nonviolent voting rights protesters brutalized on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge 60 years ago. As he wrote in an op-ed shortly before his death in 2020, it’s time that we “redeem the soul of our nation.”
