Once again, as a white man who uses a wheelchair, I feel an urgent need to distance myself as far as I can from the actions of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, another white man who uses a wheelchair.
Gage Skidmore, Peoria, Arizona, CC BY-SA 2.0
Greg Abbott speaking at FreePac, hosted by FreedomWorks, in Phoenix, Arizona, October 2012.
By some miracle, the Republican-dominated Texas state legislature was recently able to pass a law that made it easier for disabled people to vote absentee. The bill allowed voters who need help casting a ballot because they have a disability to request an electronic ballot so that they can mark it privately without the assistance of anyone else. The bill would still have required those voters to print out, sign, and return their ballots by mail.
This makes a lot of sense, since many disabled voters, like me, can’t physically handle and mark paper ballots. We need to indicate how we want to vote to someone else so they can help us. The only way we can vote privately is to do so electronically.
The main sponsors of the legislation were a Republican and a Democrat. And there was enough bipartisan support to push it all through, after failed attempts to pass similar legislation in previous sessions of the state legislature.
So the bill finally made it to the governor’s desk and all Abbott had to do was sign it into law. But he vetoed it, sending the whole process back to square one.
In vetoing, Abbott went against the advice of his own Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities, which supported the legislation.
In doing so, Abbott went against the advice of his own Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities, which supported the legislation. He explained his veto in a statement that read, “While this intent is laudable, the text of the bill . . . allows any voter who qualifies to vote by mail to receive a ballot electronically. I look forward to working with the author to craft language that achieves his worthy goal, without unintended consequences.”
I guess that means he was afraid the legislation would make it easier for some people to commit voter fraud. But I think this is a graphic example of how Republicans use fraud prevention to justify promoting policies that disenfranchise people who they think won’t vote for them.
Abbott has good reason to fear that the large majority of his fellow voters with disabilities won’t vote for guys like him. I’ve always seen the disability community as being quite politically progressive. I think that’s because when experiencing disability from the inside, the main conclusion you draw is that it’s vitally important for everyone to protect and take care of each other.
Abbott doesn’t seem to have come even close to drawing that conclusion. This is yet another action of his that tells me he believes in the political supremacy of bullies who think the purpose of their power is to protect their own narrow interests, no matter who gets hurt.
Some Texas counties have already made it possible for military voters overseas to vote electronically. Thus, they can vote privately from afar. But not so for a lot of disabled folks in Texas.