This article is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access. Early in the morning on Election Day, Angela Lang stood in a conference room in the offices of BLOC — Black Leaders Organizing for Communities — on Milwaukee’s north side, addressing nearly two dozen staff members and volunteers. It was the first time the team was together in the building since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, said Lang, the group’s executive director. They were gathered on Nov. 3 to build on months of community organizing to get out the vote among African-American voters in Wisconsin’s largest city. The stakes were immense. A worsening pandemic — and accompanying economic recession — was disproportionately harming people of color, and a nationwide reckoning surrounding racism and policing spurred residents to the streets last summer. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! “For me, what I define as success is that we sought out to increase Black voter turnout in the city of Milwaukee,” she told her team. “Despite what happens in the rest of the state, despite what happens to the rest of the country. That’s our slice of the pie.” In Wisconsin, his margin of victory was slim: just 20,539 votes, according to unofficial totals. But voter turnout was stagnant in Milwaukee — and down in primarily Black neighborhoods, a Wisconsin Watch analysis found — at a time when the number of votes cast statewide soared above 2016 levels. Wisconsin Watch examined the 17 voting wards in Milwaukee in which at least 85 percent of the voters are Black. The analysis found that the raw number of votes cast dropped in all of them in 2020 compared to 2016. The predominantly Black wards were identified by L2, a widely used proprietary voter database, and total votes cast came from the Milwaukee County Clerk’s Office. In all, voters cast 1,222 fewer votes in those 17 wards than in 2016, Wisconsin Watch found — a drop of nearly 11%. Experts and organizers say that was largely due to pandemic-related hurdles, such as the loss of crucial voter engagement tools including door-knocking, and the fact that Black voters are less likely to favor voting by mail — a method that about 60% of Wisconsin voters used to cast their ballots in 2020. Fear of the pandemic, which has ravaged Milwaukee, created additional barriers, they said. But get-out-the-vote organizers bristle at the suggestion that Black voters haven’t done their part in the past two elections — particularly in a state where lawmakers have made it disproportionately harder for them to vote. For Lang, and other activists who worked on get-out-the-vote efforts among the city’s Black and Latino communities, the numbers don’t tell the full story. To them, persuading voters to participate despite the relentless force of the COVID-19 pandemic — coupled with the same obstacles to voting that they faced in 2016 — rendered a numerically flat turnout a victory. On Saturday, with an American flag pinned to her hair at the downtown Zeidler Union Square, Lang addressed a jubilant crowd. “Let me tell you, with all these circumstances, the insurmountable barriers, I am damn proud of my city,” she said. “The fact that we had all of these challenges, and yet you still showed up? Imagine if that work didn’t happen. Imagine if the groups and the organizations didn’t make that happen. We would not be standing here today.” Overall, nearly 3.3 million Wisconsinites cast ballots in the election, compared to 3.1 million voters in 2016. But the total number of ballots cast in Milwaukee did not increase as some had predicted, remaining nearly flat with fewer than 150 votes separating the total from the 2016 figure of 247,836. Milwaukee contributed roughly 195,000 votes to Biden’s statewide vote total of 1.6 million – up about 6,000 from what Hillary Clinton won from the city in 2016. Trump also saw a bump of about 3,000 votes in Milwaukee, earning 48,414 votes in 2020, compared to 45,411 in 2016. The main difference from 2016: a drop in votes for third-party candidates. Because Wisconsin offers same-day registration, the Wisconsin Elections Commission recommends measuring turnout based on all eligible voters, not simply those who registered before Election Day, but eligibility figures are not yet available. The number of people who registered on Election Day also is not yet available. Examining only voters who registered before Election Day, turnout this year was nearly 78% in Milwaukee, lagging behind other Wisconsin cities. In Green Bay, for example, 84% of registered voters cast a ballot, about the same percentage of those who turned out in Madison.