It’s hard to actively participate in democracy if you have a disability. Just exercising your right to vote is more cumbersome than it is for people who don’t need to consider accessibility.
If you want to vote in person at your polling place on Election Day, you have to first be sure that it’s accessible.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires state and local governments and their election officials to ensure that people with disabilities have a full and equal opportunity to vote in all elections. This includes all aspects of the voting process, such as registration, selecting polling place locations, and casting ballots, whether on Election Day or during early or absentee voting.
But this doesn’t mean that all polling places are ADA-compliant, even though the ADA became law more than thirty years ago. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined 178 polling places used in the 2016 election and found that 60 percent had potential barriers to entry, such as poor paths to the doorway or steep ramps. Of the polling places the GAO examined, 65 percent had a potential access problem with the voting apparatus, such as voting stations that couldn’t accommodate people using wheelchairs.
This isn’t just a problem in rural areas. In 2022, an internal analysis from the Chicago Board of Elections found that less than 10 percent of Chicago’s polling places were ADA-compliant.
Not being in full compliance with ADA standards does not mean that a polling place is not usable by anyone with a disability. The Chicago polling place where I have voted for many years has a ramp at the entrance that is likely too steep to meet ADA standards. I can handle it, but somebody else with a disability might not be able to. And that’s the point. Perhaps the barrier that makes a polling place out of compliance will prevent you from voting if you have a disability. You can’t always assume that you can use your polling place.
You can’t even assume that polls located in public gathering places, like schools and churches, will be accessible. Churches are exempt from ADA access mandates, and, according to the publication Christianity Today, 20 percent of the more than 60,000 polling places in the United States are located in churches. Twenty-five percent or more of polling places in thirteen states were located in churches for the 2022 election.
A 2020 GAO report noted that at least a quarter of the facilities in 63 percent of public school districts weren’t physically accessible to people with disabilities. Today, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, two-thirds of public schools in the United States have barriers to access.
The National Disability Rights Network issued a scathing report in 2020 titled “Blocking the Ballot Box: Ending Misuse of the ADA to Close Polling Places.” The report highlights an infamous incident that happened in 2018 in Randolph County, Georgia, where most residents are Black. Just three months before the election that year, a consultant hired by the county board of elections recommended that seven of the county’s nine polling places be closed due to ADA noncompliance.
Fortunately, a lot of hell was raised, and the board didn’t adopt the recommendation. But the following year, the board voted to close three majority white polling places that weren’t ADA-accessible.
“Multiple jurisdictions have flown largely under the radar in citing the ADA as the reason for closing, relocating, and consolidating their polling places,” the report says. It notes the irony of using ADA compliance as an excuse to make it harder for certain people to vote when inaccessibility has made it harder for a lot of disabled people to vote.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission says that in the 2020 election, 74 percent of disabled voters cast their ballots either by mail or by voting early. I think a lot of that is driven by all the difficulties disabled people have faced, or fear they will face, when trying to vote in person. But then we run into more difficulties when we try to vote by other means.
In 2022, an internal analysis from the Chicago Board of Elections found that less than 10 percent of Chicago’s polling places were ADA-compliant.
In Indiana, some blind people filed a federal lawsuit challenging a stupid state election policy that made it hard for them to vote absentee. To cast a paper ballot, one has to be able to read and mark it. This is a problem for blind people, since they can’t read a paper ballot. But people with physical disabilities, like me, may also have difficulties. I can read a paper ballot with my eyes. But I lack the arm function necessary to take the ballot out of the envelope, mark it, and put it in the return envelope. So when I voted by mail for the 2020 election, during the height of the pandemic, one of my assistants helped me do all of that.
But in Indiana, the stupid policy that was challenged said a voter could only receive assistance in casting their ballot from traveling boards, which are people authorized by the entities administering elections in each county to go to voters’ homes and assist them. After the 2020 election, the American Council of the Blind of Indiana and some individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit charging that this violated the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against disabled people by recipients of federal funds.
One plaintiff said they made an appointment to receive assistance from a traveling board, but instead some traveling board people just showed up at their home unannounced one day. Another plaintiff claimed that they received no response to their request for traveling board assistance, so they were unable to vote in that election.
The National Federation of the Blind of Alabama and some disabled voters in that state filed a similar federal lawsuit in 2022, saying that people who are blind or have disabilities and can’t cast a ballot without assistance need “an accessible electronic ballot that they can read and mark on their own computers or smart devices, using their own assistive technology.”
The lawsuit says Alabama has a system enabling residents who are overseas or in the military to receive and submit absentee ballots electronically, and the failure to provide disabled voters with the same option violated the ADA and Section 504.
Last year, a judge dismissed the lawsuit because the defendant, the Alabama secretary of state, did not have legal authority to make the changes sought by the plaintiffs.
In Indiana, a federal judge invalidated the traveling boards requirement and ordered Indiana election administrators to allow people with print disabilities to be assisted in casting absentee ballots by a person of their choosing, with some exceptions.
The Indiana plaintiffs also sought the right to vote electronically, but the judge said that since nobody in Indiana has a legal right to vote electronically, she would not grant that right exclusively to disabled people.
Of course, there is the infamous Texas voter suppression law Senate Bill 1, which was also challenged by a lawsuit shortly after it became law in 2021. That complaint says the law “erects barriers to voting that will disproportionately and unlawfully deny equal access to individuals with disabilities.” It adds that SB 1 subjects them to extra hassle by requiring anyone who assists another person in casting their ballot to “disclose and document their name, address, relationship to the voter, and whether the assistor received compensation.”
According to the lawsuit, SB 1 says that assistants, under penalty of perjury, must swear to limit their assistance to “reading the ballot to the voter, directing the voter to read the ballot, marking the voter’s ballot, or directing the voter to mark the ballot.”
The Justice Department filed another lawsuit charging, among other things, that SB 1 violates Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act by improperly restricting what assistance voters who have disabilities or are unable to read or write can receive when voting in person.
In 2022, a federal judge ruled that the portion of SB 1 that limited the type of help a voter can receive from an assistant could not be enforced. The state of Texas did not appeal.
I’m glad I’ve never lived in Texas, because when I vote at my polling place, I take one of my assistants. I tell them who I want to vote for and they mark the ballot and drop it in the box. If they were asked to sign something stating who they are and how they are helping me, it would rile me up because I don’t think that’s anybody’s damn business.