Across Louisiana, the 2023 Gubernatorial voter turnout reached a historical low, and Iberia Parish wasn’t any different.

Across the board, only 38% of voters cast a ballot, versus the 48.7% which voted in the 2019 election. These numbers are even starker when you break them down by demographic. In 2019, 41.2% of Black voters cast a ballot, but that number dropped by nearly half to 25.48% in 2023.

While the percentage of white and other minority voters dropped only marginally, Black voters took the biggest hit, and Wilfred Johnson with Black Voters Matter said he believes perception is the root cause.

“They are not in agreement with how the system works. They believe that it’s fixed or rigged, they believe that the decision that’s going to be made has already been made,” Johnson said.

Black Voters Matter spent thousands of dollars canvassing, telling people to vote and where to find a polling place. They spent time educating and putting boots on the ground to advocate for the importance of voting.

“We aren’t counting this a loss, but rather a setback. Black Voters Matter, along with the Power Coalition and the ACLU, had boots on the ground. We canvassed the communities three times at least, both during the primary and the general. We provided rides to the polls for early voting and on each election day. We invested a lot of money into this, and we fell short, but we are not Blacking Down,” Johnson said.

Black Voters Matter plans to organize to reeducate people about the voting cycle, how it works, and its impact in our lives.

Another prominent figure in New Iberia’s minority advocacy groups is Phanat Xanamane, who ran for Senate District 22 and saw the election results slightly differently. He started his campaign only two months before the election, but he was able to effectively mobilize a community which never really participated in the vote: Asian immigrants.

Xanamane performed slightly better than expected, but he said that would never have happened had he not encouraged Asian immigrants to vote and built a system of support to actually get them to the polls.

Unfortunately, that didn’t encourage enough voters, and Xanamane encountered similar challenges as Johnson, but even deeper. He said it wasn’t so much that people believe the election is rigged, but rather they don’t see a difference in their lives between political parties.

“It’s the general empathy and lack of understanding for the civics end of the election process that I come across. Another would be the two-party system, citing the general lack of material changes in quality of life especially among low-income communities despite what party is in power,” Xanamane said.

David Ditch, Iberia Parish Clerk of Court, said the outcome was disappointing, but not surprising and it speaks to a wider problem with voters across the nation.

“The sentiment you hear is that people are just disgusted with everything nationally and they showed it by not going out to vote,” Ditch concluded.