I’m sadly not at all surprised to learn that there are a whole host of issues with accessibility at voting locations — but these numbers are pretty staggering.
A Government Accountability Office report to be released Wednesday found that in last November’s historic election, nearly one-third of polling places failed to accommodate voters in wheelchairs. Twenty-three percent had machines for the disabled that offered less privacy than offered to others — some even positioned in a way that other people could see how they were voting.
The study of 730 polling places in 31 states said improvements have been made since the agency’s last similar survey in 2000. But it found that 73 percent of polling places had some sort of impediment, such as narrow doorways or steep curbs, that might impede access to the voting area for people with disabilities. Nearly half of those sites offered curbside voting as an alternative.
“We are a far cry from where we need to be,” said Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, who requested the report. He said in a statement he would work with the Justice Department, which has jurisdiction to enforce federal election laws, to seek improvements.
The problems persist despite the fact that the first law requiring polling locations to be more accessible to people with disabilities was passed 25 years ago, and that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to put regulations into effect:
In 1984, Congress passed a law requiring states to make polling places more accessible to the elderly and disabled. The issue was addressed again in the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act and in the 2002 Help America Vote Act, and it came with money — hundreds of millions have been given to states to make polling places more accessible.
“When problems arise in the administration of elections, we have a responsibility to fix them,” President George W. Bush said at the time. An author of the law, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., called it “nothing less than the first civil rights legislation of the 21st century.”
But seven years later, some local jurisdictions refuse to move polling places, arguing that voters won’t know where to vote or that there’s no place in the jurisdiction that meets the disability access requirement, said Lee Page, associate advocacy director at Paralyzed Veterans of America.
The article later goes on to note that even many of those locations which have accessible means of voting aren’t putting them into practice, because poll workers don’t know how to use the machines and/or just don’t want to deal with it.
I hope that when we consider the right to vote an extremely fundamental right in this country, at least in theory if not always in practice, the problem here is clear. When voting locations are not accessible to all citizens, rights are being violated, and they are being violated in a clearly discriminatory way. Period.
And while the option to vote absentee is often a very necessary one and should absolutely remain open for those who need it, one activist also notes an additional problem with the lack of accessibility actually within the voting location:
That leaves disabled voters the option of having the ballot brought out of the polling place to them, being reassigned to a different jurisdiction or voting absentee, Lee said.
“You want to vote with everyone else at your jurisdiction because it’s … part of the community,” Page said. “To find barriers in this simple issue is really disheartening, truthfully.”
I think that most of us know this to be true, even if we haven’t consciously had to think of it before. There is a certain pride that a whole lot of people get with regards to entering that voting location and waiting along with other voters to cast their ballot. There is a major community aspect to voting, quite often regardless of whether or not community members are voting the same way.
And that may seem like a relatively small problem compared to disenfranchisement. But a major, major method through which ableism functions in our society is the method of exclusion. Inaccessibility of all kinds doesn’t just prevent many people with disabilities from being able to go as many places or do as many things as they could in a non-ableist world — it also quite often serves to physically separate them from able-bodied people and denies them a place in the community. And that is in absolutely no way a small thing.
{ 13 comments }
I’m going to be 30 in a few months, and I’ve never voted in person before. Hailing from the great state of Oregon, I’ve had the benefit of always being able to vote by mail for every election. And, here in CA, I’m of course an absentee voter.
I really think its about time vote by mail became the standard across the country. I won’t deny that vote by mail has problems, but there seems to be no shortage of controversy associated with polling booths. Talk to anyone my age or younger in Oregon or Washington, and they would have no concept whatsoever of voting in person, other than vague memories of their parents doing it in the 80s and early 90s.
I should of course note that I’m probably blind to some aspects of ableism associated even with vote by mail systems.
Amanda in the South Bay, do you know if absentee ballots are available in Braille?
From what I’ve been able to gather in Far Northern Canada, we do voting differently than Americans. (Amongst other things, we don’t use voting machines.)
I’m also wondering, now that I’ve started, whether or not voting instructions are provided in Sign, and whether or not Polling Information is provided by TTY at all.
I think I shared my story in November when everyone was posting stories about how they experienced voting as a child. My dad had Polio when he was four and never walked again. He went to schools segregated for disabled students (lumping physically and mentally disabled students together, thus giving NONE of them the individualized care they needed). He still deals with all kinds of daily aggravations and, being out with him in the world, I grew up seeing all those aggravations. A big one for him, because of the symbolism involved, was voting.
We never had a precinct where he could access the polls. Some years he would vote absentee but he HATED it. He wanted to be part of that community of voters. One year I remember walking alongside him for a block or more to access a curb cut and then having to go all the way back to where we started just so he could get to the door of a polling place. When I was older he sometimes sent me in to have someone come to his van and take his ballot. Seeing my dad go to all that trouble impressed on me the importance of voting, but it was also so wrong and unnecessary. It’s just one more reminder, one more aggravation, but it’s huge too.
I don’t think Amanda from South Bay meant her comment this way, but just because she prefers her choice to vote by mail doesn’t mean this isn’t an important issue. We value the way we vote for many reasons, and that same ease of voting in person, or the choice (not force) to vote another way, should be easily accessible to EVERYONE.
i know that i have *had* to vote absentee, because the polling place i am supposed to go to?
is a PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL, and the voting takes place in the cafeteria, and the ONLY public access to the cafeteria? is half a flight of stairs. this is AFTER going up a FULL flight of stairs to enter the “ground floor”, again with *no* disabled access to enter the building itself; then, within the building, NO access except by stairs.
the school apparently gets away with not being accessable because it’s just *that* old and there isn’t money to put in an elevator (and, school officials told me, no need. there are apparently *no* disabled students who are supposed to go to this school at all. in a city of over a million. huh.)
so… yeah. i have nothing constructive, i guess. except to ask: what the *HELL* are they spending all that money ON?
Thanks for this post. Accessibility is so important and so often missing. It’s an interesting exercise to spend a normal day keeping your eyes open for how you would get around doing the things you need to do if you were in a wheelchair. Generally, you you will see the equivalent of many do-not-enter signs. The voting problem isn’t bad here because you can vote by mail, but I’m not surprised it’s bad elsewhere.
Wow. I was going to say, why not just use only schools as polling places because don’t schools have to be accessible? But — after denelian’s comment — I guess not. Wow!
Jennifer, I think Amanda in South Bay was trying to explain that she doesn’t have the option to vote at a physical polling place because everyone in Oregon votes by mail. So, it’s not a choice. But in places where people do vote in person and where that is part of a community activity, of course it’s not good that folks should be excluded.
I certainly didn’t mean to denigrate anyone’s method of voting, or to imply that voting by mail is 100% perfect!
Its just that to someone like me, my age, from Oregon or Washington, has absolutely no concept of any sort of shared community resulting from voting-its just like paying the bills. Obviously issues exist with mail voting-here is a webpage, for example, detailing how to audio vote in Oregon.
http://oregonvotes.org/HAVA/votingguide_audio/faq.html
Human- For several years our precinct was in a public school’s library but my dad still couldn’t access the room because setting up all the booths and stuff made it too crowded for him to be able to navigate.
Amanda– I understand what you were trying to say, which is why I was careful to say that I didn’t think you intended your comment to be dismissive, but it still was somewhat dismissive. Voting by mail for everyone may be a better way to do things, I guess it works for Oregon and Washington. But it feels like diminishing the problem to say the sense of community in voting isn’t done everywhere anyway. It’s an important issue to people in 48 other states at least. It would be nice to have seen a little bit of acknowledgement on that.
This probably has a lot to do with where I live/grew-up, but voting by mail seems problematic. I generally only use USPS if I have absolutely no other choice, and even then I suck it up and fork over the extra cash for certified mail because the postal service in my area is so bad I can’t afford to trust it.
My bigger worry, though, would be one of vote tampering. Whats to stop a politically active postal service worker from losing ballots in a given region or neighborhood? What happens when someone vandalizes mail boxes in an area a few days before the election? What happens when the post office inevitably loses ballots due to incompetence? If the ballots are mailed to you, what happens when they don’t show up? What happens if you’re homeless or change your address often?
Voting by mail is certainly valuable as one option, but if it’s the only choice what happens to the quad that physically needs someone else to fill out the ballot and get it in the mail? What if all her helpers have political views contrary to hers? How can she be sure her ballot as she wishes it filled out gets counted?
Being able to get in a polling place and have as many mechanisms as possible available for privacy (or trained poll workers who are supposed to be at the service of the democratic process) helps ensure that people with disabilities have their votes counted.
William-
If you are concerned about USPS fraud, then shouldn’t you logically also ban absentee balloting? How many credible accusations of ballot tampering by USPS employees has there been in any jurisdiction?
BTW, the number of registered absentee voters in CA as of 20 OCT 08 was greater than the entire population of the state of Oregon, and as of yet I have heard of no accusations of USPS fraud in either state.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/sov/2008_general/sov_complete.pdf
Here in Oklahoma, even the normal voting is not set up for anyone who doesn’t meet a certain form and has no privacy. The “booths” are stands with two crossed dividers that create four spaces on which to fill out the ballot, but the stand itself is very tall (at 5′1″, it is basically up to my armpits when I’m standing). There is no screen to block others’ view, and my voting place in the last election was so crowded, there were people bumping into me. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for disabled people. And yet my legislators are too busy trying to basically ban abortion to care…
Comments on this entry are closed.