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.
via FRIDA