People with disabilities: the sleeping giant of American politics

Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Jim Dickson

Fifty-six million Americans have some type of disability. Two and a half million people use wheelchairs, 110,000 are blind and have no light perception, 1.7 million are legally blind, and 11 million people use sign language as their primary means of communication. These are visible disabilities.

However, it is important to know that most disabilities are "invisible." Less visible are disabilities caused by epilepsy, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, traumatic brain injury, mental retardation, AIDS, some forms of multiple sclerosis, psychiatric disabilities, and cancer.

Voting Registration and People with Disabilities

For a number of reasons, people who are disabled vote at a 10-20 percent lower rate that nondisabled voters. In fact, if people with disabilities voted at the same rate as those without disabilities, 4.6 million more votes would have been cast in the last presidential election. (1)

Poor voter turnout by Americans with disabilities is partly a result of low voter registration rates. There are approximately 27 million people with disabilities who did not wrote in the 2000 presidential election; more than 10 million are not even registered to vote. (2) In fact, people with disabilities register to vote at a rate that is 16 percent lower than able-bodied Americans. (3)

The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), known as the Motor Voter Law, requires state agencies that provide services to persons with disabilities to offer voter registration to their clients "with each application for such services or assistance, and with each recertification, renewal or change of address form." (4) A National Organization on Disability/Louis Harris poll reports that only 58 percent of people with disabilities have been offered the opportunity to register to vote by their service providers, indicating widespread violation of the NVRA. (5)

Agencies required to offer this service include Paratransit providers. Paratransit is a public transportation system that offers curb-to-curb or door-to-door transportation for people with disabilities. Approximately one million people with disabilities nationwide receive Paratransit rides, and at least 400,000 of these individuals are not registered to vote. Recently, a district court in Pennsylvania ruled that the NVRA requires state-funded Paratransit agencies to provide voter registration opportunities to their clients. (6) Plaintiffs in the case requested that the court make a declaration that the state violated the NVRA by failing to designate its transportation authorities as voter registration agencies.

A Question of Access

One of the reasons people with disabilities, especially those in wheelchairs, do not vote is because of difficulty accessing polling places. A Rutgers University poll reports that 27 percent of nonvoting people with disabilities expect to have access problems at the polls. A General Accounting Office (GAO) report states that 84 percent of all polling places have some sort of barrier to voters with mobility disabilities. (7) Gary Bartlett, the executive secretary-director of the State Board of Elections in North Carolina, recently surveyed the polling places in one of his counties. He found that 20 percent of that county's polling places had been classified incorrectly as accessible. Rhode Island is the only state in the country to make all its polling places wheelchair accessible.

Over the past few years, the disability community and election officials have been meeting to address these ballot access problems. The National Task Force on Election Accessibility published in 2000 a polling place access guide that is available on the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) Web site, www.aapd-dc.org. This guide has been mailed by the Federal Election Commission to every election official in the country.

On the other hand, some states are making changes because the courts are forcing them to do so. On February 8, 2000, Judge Howard G. Munson of the Northern District of New York granted an injunction by that state's attorney general requiring that Schoharie and Delaware counties modify their polling places to comply with the New York State Election Law and the Americans with Disabilities Act prior to New York's presidential primaries. The lengthy and detailed decision rejected each of the counties' arguments, including that the attorney general's demands were unnecessary and "overly bureaucratic." (8) Lawsuits have also been filed against Philadelphia and Jacksonville, Florida. In August 2002, a settlement was reached in a suit against the District of Columbia, requiring accessibility for blind and mobility-impaired voters. (9)

In addition to the problem of physical access to the polling place, millions of disabled Americans are denied the right to cast a secret ballot. This includes voters who are blind and low vision, as well as those who have limited hand mobility. However, technology does exist that enables these voters to cast a secret ballot on a "talking voting system." The voter hears the ballot and follows the prompts in the same manner as when a customer calls his bank or utility company, only in this case the computer is reading the names of candidates for office. Maryland and Georgia require one such accessible voting machine in every polling place, and the city of Houston has already used such a system in two elections. There are five manufacturers of accessible voting equipment. These are listed on the AAPD Web site.