The Republican leader’s claim about high voter turnout in previous elections wasn’t too far off base, but that doesn’t mean voting access is assured.

“Well, the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,” he responded.

McConnell’s comments raised questions about how turnout for Black voters compared with that of other demographic groups, and what that might say about voting access.

In the 2020 election, for example, 62.6 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 66.8 percent of all eligible Americans, a difference of 4.2 percentage points.

So while Black American voter turnout is not “just as high” as overall voter turnout, as Mr.

According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Michael McDonald, a voter turnout expert at the University of Florida, Black Americans have almost always voted at lower rates than white Americans.

McDonald’s analysis, in the 1988 presidential election, 46.8 percent of eligible Black Americans voted, compared with 55.7 percent of eligible white Americans — a gap of 8.9 percentage points.

But overall, the 2020 election attracted the highest voter turnout in more than a century.

However, high voter turnout and perceptions that voting was easy in past elections do not prove that concerns about voting access in future elections are “misplaced,” as Mr.

And the high turnout in 2020 was fueled in part by unusually high voter engagement