McConnell's controversial statement on Black voters was factually wrong Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stepped in it the other day, making remarks during the debate over new state voting laws that were roundly criticized for suggesting that Black voters were not Americans. He later clarified that he had inadvertently failed to include the word "all" before "Americans." Obviously, we're more interested in McConnell's factual dexterity than his verbal dexterity. And it turns out he earned Two Pinocchios when he said "if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans." A McConnell spokesman directed us to census data showing that Black turnout was relatively close to overall turnout in recent elections. In the most recent presidential election, the gap was about four percentage points, but it was closer in the three previous election cycles. But here's the trick McConnell is playing. He's comparing Black turnout to overall turnout. These are not comparable data sets. It is more appropriate to measure Black turnout against White turnout. In 2020, for instance, 72.6 percent of non-Hispanic White Americans voted, compared with 65.6 percent of non-Hispanic Black Americans — a gap of seven percentage points. In 2016, the gap was 4.8 percentage points. The McConnell spokesman also pointed to census data that indicated that in states affected by the Voting Rights Act, the gap between Black and White turnout was much smaller than the national average. But there's a catch. Apparently, Black voters in the South are more likely to respond to the census voting questions than those outside the South. That results in a lot of missing data — and the Census Bureau has chosen to count the missing data as "did not vote." A Census spokesperson said for that reason raw data at the state level needs to be adjusted. Please click the link to read our comprehensive report. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Human trafficking statistics: caveat emptor Human trafficking, both for sex and labor, is a horrific crime plagued by poor statistics. Readers may recall that in 2015, The Fact Checker published a series of articles that debunked or exposed faulty statistics that anti-trafficking groups had used to garner institutional and financial support. The good news is that many anti-trafficking groups responded and scrubbed their websites and literature of unproven claims. The bad news is that there still are no reliable and up-to-date statistics that might illuminate the scope of the problem. Recent remarks by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Vice President Harris, both drawing from the same data source, gave us an opportunity to educate readers on the limitations of this data. The numbers came from an anti-trafficking group called Polaris, which operates the $4-million-a-year National Human Trafficking Hotline. Polaris, in assembling the material that Youngkin and Harris relied on, includes small-type caveats that warns that policymakers should be careful with the numbers. Official numbers from the FBI are even smaller, but there are problem with this data as well. So figures on human trafficking remain incredibly fuzzy and imprecise. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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