In its tabulations, the Census Bureau counts any American citizen of voting age as an eligible voter. But nearly one in 10 black men are ineligible to vote because of state laws that apply to people with felony convictions.
The census report listed the turnout rate for black men as 61.4 percent, compared with 70.4 percent for black women. However, once noninstitutionalized felons — people who are not in prison but lost the right to vote as punishment — are removed from the tally of eligible voters, the turnout rate among black men rises to 68 percent, according to Bernard L. Fraga, a political scientist at Harvard, and the rate among black women rises to 71.4 percent.
