Sunshine Sentinel

Census data shows that voter suppression claims over the past year by some of the nation’s leading Democrats are completely unfounded, wrote Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative with the Heritage Foundation, in a recent Fox News op-ed piece.

“There is no suppression going on of anyone’s votes anywhere in the country,” von Spakovsky wrote. “Anyone who says otherwise is just making it up.”

Kamala Harris, von Spakovsky says, “made that false claim about ‘voter suppression’ in September last year when she was running for office."

Hans von Spakovsky | Heritage Foundation

“Yet the Census survey shows that there was higher turnout among all races in 2020 when compared to the 2016 election,” von Spakovsky wrote. “Black Americans turned out at 63%, compared to 60% in 2016.”

He also claims that associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta has repeatedly made “dishonest” claims about voting rights.

“But 59% of Asian Americans voted in 2020, a 10-percentage point increase from 2016 when 49% turned out to vote,” he wrote. “Only 47% of Asian Americans voted in 2008 and 2012 when Obama ran for office and was reelected, including during a period when Gupta was in charge of the Civil Rights Division at Justice and was supposed to be protecting voting rights.”

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed regarding the census data agrees with von Spakovsky’s assertions. Red states with stricter voter rules for the November elections saw no significant drop in minority voting. In fact, black turnout in Mississippi, at 72.8%, was a close second to blue state Maryland at 75.3% among national leaders for black voting. Both were far ahead of blue Massachusetts’ 36.4% for black voter turnout.

“Liberals have lambasted Georgia for ‘purging’ voters and restricting ballot access,” the Wall Street Journal editors noted. “But Georgia had a smaller black-white voting gap than Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia and California – all states controlled by Democrats.”

"Yet new Census voting data show these claims are as meritless as Donald Trump’s that the election was stolen," the WSJ opinion piece said.

Von Spakovsky said that the “bottom line of the Census Bureau’s survey is that Americans are easily registering – when they want to – and they are turning out to vote when they are interested in the candidates who are running for election.”