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Voting Rights and People with Disabilities

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Special Guest Blog by Michelle Bishop,

Fair Elections Center Board Member

Michelle Bishop Headshot

In my position as Voter Access & Engagement Manager at the National Disability Rights Network (NDRN), I cover the Venn space where you take the overlap of disability rights and voting rights and put them together. This area became part of the NDRN with the passage of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which ensures access to the vote for people with disabilities.  

 

Voting Rights and People with Disabilities

 

People with disabilities face multiple issues around voting access. Perhaps the easiest for most people to visualize is facilities access. For example, some polling places are in church basements, which have no elevator and can only be accessed via a flight of stairs. What do you do if you use a wheelchair? 

That example is easy to wrap your brain around, but access to vote for people with disabilities includes a lot more than just physical access. 

The ADA’s Broad Definition of “Disability”

It’s important to remember that the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) definition of “disability” is designed to be really broad because it provides so many important civil rights protections. Basically, it says that any condition that substantially limits one or more major life activities counts as a disability. That includes physical disabilities, such as being deaf or blind or using a wheelchair. It also includes mental illness and learning disabilities, such as ADHD, dyslexia, depression, PTSD, and anxiety. It includes people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It includes people with an HIV diagnosis and in recovery from drug addiction. It’s a powerfully inclusive understanding of what it means to have a disability.

Barriers to Voting Look Different Depending on the Disability

Based on that definition, it follows that access means different things to people with different types of disabilities. If I use a wheelchair, the major barrier for me is that the voting place has stairs and no ramp. If I am deaf, the major barrier is that there’s no sign language interpreter. You can’t vote if the poll workers can’t figure out how to communicate with you effectively. If I have an intellectual or learning disability, maybe it’s difficult for me to read the ballot—especially when the legalese we use on ballot measures is beyond anyone’s comprehension. If I have hand tremors, what’s difficult for me is marking the ballot. So I need to use the touchscreen machine because I can’t physically mark a paper ballot with a pen. 

2016 GAO Survey

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducts periodic surveys of polling place accessibility. In 2016, the survey found that fewer than half of polling places actually complied with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Only about 40% of the polling places surveyed met the architectural standards of the ADA, which state that if a door is too heavy, it should be propped open; if there are stairs, you should provide a ramp. 40% should sound shockingly low—but it was also an all-time high in the GAO’s studies dating back to 2000.

When the GAO looked at whether the voting booth itself is accessible—meaning there is a wheelchair-accessible voting machine set up and ready to use with headphones and an audio ballot—the number of ADA-compliant polling places dropped below 20%. In some cases, the accessible voting machine had never even been set up and turned on.

People With Disabilities Are Overrepresented in Other Communities Facing Voter Suppression 

Additionally, people with disabilities are overrepresented among communities facing voter suppression, including Black, Asian, and Native American communities and among people in the corrections system. There is a long history of voter suppression on Native American reservations, and people with disabilities are disproportionately represented among Native American communities. My organization does a lot of work these days around access to the vote in jails and prisons, because our society over-incarcerates people with disabilities rather than providing effective supports for community living, and jails and prisons often create disabilities among the inmates, including mental illnesses such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety. 

People with disabilities are also disproportionately low income, and low-income people in general are less likely to have the correct type of photo identification in states that have restrictive voter ID requirements, have reliable transportation, or the ability to take time off to vote. 

The Gap Between the Law and Reality

Federal law says that if it’s open to the public, it has to be accessible. So polling places have to be accessible. Poll workers must provide you with accommodations if you need them. If you can’t mark a paper ballot by hand, there has to be an accessible machine there for you to use. 

But in reality, not every polling place has a sign language interpreter or a touchscreen machine on the premises. We’re working on it, but we’re not there yet. So what happens if you’re excited about voting and you show up to vote and the system is not set up to work for you? How many voters have a really frustrating experience and never go back? How many potential voters are getting the message that their voice doesn’t matter?

Plan Ahead

For now, the safest solution is often to plan ahead. We encourage making a plan to vote ahead of time: How are you going to cast your ballot? Do you need to travel somewhere? How are you going to get there? Do you need someone to assist you? Are you going to have to wait in line? If so, do you need to bring your medications with you and some water?

Closing the Gap

To close the gap, we do a lot of work around training poll workers. Pollworking is a challenging job, and we devote very little time and resources to train poll workers. So the result is that often they are not trained in offering accommodations to people with disabilities. For example, they may not be aware of the accommodation features included in accessible voting systems, such as the touchscreen, changing font sizes, adjusting contrast, and listening via audio. 

We also spend a lot of time building relationships with elections officials, county clerks, boards of elections, state election directors, and secretaries of state, to work collaboratively. Many of them are very open to collaboration. They tell us, “Yes, please. We can’t afford to have in-house expertise in this. We’re going to show you our worst polling places. Can you help us make them accessible? Can you look at our poll worker training curriculum and tell us how we can make it better?”

Message For a Person Without a Disability Reading This: Cultivate Awareness

If you’re reading this and you don’t have a disability, we ask that when you go to vote, you have your eyes open and think about, for example, “Would this work for me if I was blind?” “Would this work for me if I used a wheelchair?” That’s the starting place, and then you can do something about it, too.  We get a lot of calls from people with disabilities to Election Protection (the 866-OUR-VOTE vote hotline), but you don’t have to have a disability to call. We sometimes get calls from non-disabled people who say something like, “This doesn’t look right to me…” And nine times out of ten, they’re right. It was a violation of the law, and we’re thankful when those folks call in. So, just starting to be deliberately aware of people with disabilities and access and just being an ally in that way can be extremely powerful. 

Message for a Person With a Disability Reading This: Your Voice is Powerful

It is my job to talk about the barriers that exist when we go to vote. Calling those things out is part of how we change them over time and get them fixed. But I don’t want a person with a disability to ever read this and think that it sounds too difficult to vote and to stay home on election day. 

In this blog, I alluded to recent legislation that restricts people’s right to vote, including voter-ID laws, unaddressed access issues, and closing polling places. Passing voter restriction laws requires a great deal of time, money, and effort. So if you come up against a barrier to your vote, what that should tell you is that your vote is incredibly powerful. Why else would people spend a whole lot of time and money trying to stop you from voting at all?

How powerful? A recent report by the Rutgers Program for Disability Research estimated that 40.2 million people with disabilities were eligible to vote last November, a 5.1% increase since 2020 due to an aging population and medical advances. As a voting demographic, there are more eligible voters with disabilities (40.2 million) than eligible voters who are Hispanic/Latino (35.7 million) or Black (31.1 million).

So don’t let anyone stop you from using that power. They wouldn’t try to restrict your vote if they didn’t know exactly how powerful you were.  

 

Some Voting Resources for People With Disabilities