Black, Latino, young, and disabled Alabamians are being shut out at the highest rates- and the Alabama Voting Right Act that could help died in the legislature this session.
BY SPEAKIN’ OUT NEWS
MONTGOMERY — More than 815,000 Alabamians — roughly one in five adults of voting age in the state — do not regularly participate in elections. A new report released this month argues that the cause is not apathy. It is policy.
The report, titled “Missing Voters: The Real Threat to Alabama’s Democracy,” was published by Stand Up Mobile, the Southern Leadership for Voter Engagement Network, and Dēmos, a national nonprofit public policy organization. It documents in detail how registration hurdles, aggressive voter roll purges, polling place closures, and access barriers have systematically pushed Black, Latino, young, and disabled Alabamians out of the democratic process.
“More than 800,000 Alabamians are missing from our elections, and that should concern all of us,” said Beverly Cooper, co-founder of Stand Up Mobile. “But this report also gives us something just as important — a clearer understanding of what people are facing and what we can do about it.”
The data on racial disparity is stark. Statewide, 14.9 percent of Black voters are inactive compared to 12.7 percent of white voters. Black voters have higher inactivity rates than white voters in all but four Alabama counties — Jefferson, Mobile, Montgomery, and Lee. The report attributes this gap not to disengagement, but to a system that was built, and continues to operate, with barriers that fall disproportionately on communities of color.
“It’s no accident that these barriers to the ballot box have affected so many Alabamians — many were specifically designed to close the door on voters of color and low-income communities,” said Keshia Morris Desir, associate director of Democracy at Dēmos. “All voters deserve to have an equal say. Alabama lawmakers should adopt policies that expand and empower the electorate, as laid out in the report, rather than shut out their voices.”
Carlos Javier Torres, director of policy and strategic partnerships at the Hispanic and Immigrant Center of Alabama, was equally direct about the experience of Latino voters. “We have a system that creates barriers to entry for voter registration for people who do not look or sound white,” Torres said. “The system has actually ingrained this into their process as a way to keep us from engaging in the civic process of voting.”
The report’s findings arrive against a backdrop of documented voter roll failures. In Mobile County alone, more than 37,000 voters showed up to the polls during last September’s mayoral runoff only to discover their registrations had been marked inactive — often without their knowledge. Mobile County Probate Judge Mark Erwin said many of those deactivations were tied to Motor Voter Act processes that voters were unaware of.
The authors argue that Alabama’s aggressive approach to list maintenance — systematically purging voter rolls — compounds the problem and creates a chilling effect that discourages participation even among those who are technically eligible.
Many of the solutions outlined in the report — including automatic voter registration, same-day registration, expanded absentee access, and new preclearance requirements — were incorporated into the Alabama Voting Rights Act, a bill introduced in the 2026 Legislative Session. Both the House and Senate versions of the bill failed to advance out of their respective chambers before the session ended, leaving the structural barriers the report identifies fully intact.
“Barriers to voting have grown more sophisticated, more bureaucratic and more difficult to navigate,” said one advocate at a statehouse voting rights rally in April. “These tactics may look technical on paper, but their impact is undeniable. They determine who is heard and who is ignored; who has influence and who is left out; who feels welcome in our democracy and who feels pushed aside.”
For Black communities in Huntsville, Madison County, and across Alabama’s 7th Congressional District — the civil rights corridor where generations fought and bled for the right to vote — those 815,000 missing voters are not a statistic. They are neighbors, family members, and community members whose voices are being systematically excluded from the decisions that shape their lives.
