This article was originally published on The 19th on November 9, 2023.
According to the latest survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), one in five voters with disabilities needed assistance or experienced difficulty voting in 2022 – three times the rate for people without disabilities.
The research report, “Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2022 Election,” focuses on the challenges faced by the estimated 30 million Americans with disabilities who are eligible to vote and the negative impact this has on their participation in society.
The survey assesses the accessibility of elections by looking at things like voter turnout, difficulties faced while voting and response from election officials.
A person with a disability was 20 percent likely to have difficulty voting in person, compared with 6 percent for people without disabilities. When voting by mail, a person with a disability was 6 percent likely to have difficulty voting, compared with 1 percent for people without disabilities.
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Ola Ojewumi, a Maryland-based disability rights advocate who is immunocompromised and uses a wheelchair, knows the challenges of gaining the right to vote all too well.
While an absentee ballot is usually sufficient, Ojewumi missed the deadline to vote due to her severe hospitalization and had to vote in person in the November 2022 election. After waiting for hours for a wheelchair-accessible Uber that never came, she drove herself to the polling station. When it was her turn to vote, she requested a polling station where she could sit down, but was initially met with resistance from poll workers, who told her she did not look disabled.
In the end, she was given a chair and a voting booth, but by then the damage had already been done.
“Nobody should have to prove their disability. Nobody. It’s dehumanizing. They should have access to whatever they need in life, everything they need, period,” Ojewumi said.
Surveys have found that challenges like the one she faced discourage voters from voting.
After the 2020 study, the EAC estimated that if voters with disabilities had voted at the same rate as voters without disabilities, there would have been roughly 2 million more votes. It also found that the voter turnout rate for people with disabilities was 3.6% lower than for people without disabilities, but that figure shrank to 1.5% after adjusting for updated census data.
Difficulties in voting were most prevalent among people with visual or cognitive impairments, who were more likely to experience difficulties voting in person than by mailing their ballot. In 2022, about three-fifths of voters with disabilities voted by mail or early, compared with just over half of voters without disabilities.
Difficulties with voting cited included being unable to enter the polling station because of stairs, being unable to read or see the ballot, difficulty using voting equipment, being unable to mark the ballot, and being unable to communicate with poll workers or other staff.
While the study found progress in voting accessibility from 2012 to 2022, officials acknowledged that the work is not done, especially as it relates to an increase in mail-in voting that improves voting access for people with disabilities during COVID-19.
“In 2022, elections offices across the country maintained the momentum seen in the 2020 election to make elections accessible to voters with disabilities, but our research shows there is still work to be done,” McCormick said.
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The independent, nonpartisan EAC was established by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and uses survey data to accomplish its mission of “helping election officials improve election administration and empowering Americans to participate in the voting process.” The EAC does not release information about its survey methodology, including how it contacted respondents, what part of the country they come from, or the margin of error.
“The findings of this study are critical to the EAC’s efforts to provide state and local election officials with the resources and guidance they need to develop plans to assist voters with disabilities and ensure polling places are fully accessible,” EAC Chair Christy McCormick said in a statement.
Rutgers University partnered with EAC and the research firm SSRS to conduct the 2022 post-election survey of eligible voters with and without disabilities. The survey was also conducted in 2012 and 2020 with 2,001 respondents, of whom 1,198 had disabilities.
The authors note that the large number of disabled and non-disabled respondents was chosen to ensure a large enough sample to limit margin of error and provide a reliable breakdown by key disability types and demographic variables.
In response to election administration problems experienced in the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which established comprehensive election reform and, for the first time, included provisions for voters with disabilities, including making non-visual ballots and materials available to voters who are blind or visually impaired, or accommodations such as seated voting areas or ramps.
Disability activists and advocates have been working for decades to improve voting access, often founding organizations to help voters left behind by government.
In early 2016, Alice Wong, Andrew Pullan, and Greg Beratan co-founded the hashtag #CriptheVote as a call to action to not only get more voters with disabilities to the polls, but also to draw attention to the barriers that remain to their fair and safe access to democracy. The hashtag has grown into a bipartisan movement and online community for voters with disabilities to continue discussing political and policy issues.
As founder of the global education nonprofit Project Ascend, Ojewumi is also committed to improving accessibility for those who need it, especially those with disabilities. After years of working at the intersection of disability advocacy and politics as a consultant, writer, and activist, she saw an opportunity to help people with disabilities not only get to the polls, but understand what protections and rights they have as voters with disabilities when it comes to voting. Project Ascend is a grants program and organization that supports and funds community service and education organizations.
Fixing an inaccessible world is not new work for Ojewumi, from negotiating early releases from hospitals so she wouldn’t miss elections to educating poll workers about the rights of voters with disabilities. And yet, she has what can only be described as a love-hate relationship with voting.
“It may sound cliché but voting is very important if you want change. Voting is very powerful especially for people with disabilities. But we need to be a part of the dialogue and policies but at the same time I understand voter apathy because every day we feel like we don’t matter,” Ojewumi said.
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Some advocates stress that voting is not a panacea. Imani Barbarin is a disability advocate and communications specialist who also hosts “Vote for Access,” a five-part YouTube series that examines voting issues for people with disabilities. She said telling people with disabilities to “just go vote” is not enough and doesn’t address the challenges they face both inside and outside the polls.
“Voting is important, but it’s also about life and survival, and most people with disabilities in this country have a hard time voting,” Balvarin told The 19th. “People with disabilities are tired of being talked about in elections as an impact or a publicity stunt.”
“When we think about voting, when we think about who can vote, we don’t think about people with disabilities,” she said, “as members of society, much less as members of the electorate.”