Commentary
Disability Community
Voting-Access Ideas
Finally Registering
By Susan Cohen
As a disability advocate for more than 20 years, I was recently
asked why it matters whether individuals with disabilities get equal access to
the voting process.
When I was in school, individuals with obvious
disabilities rode in little yellow school buses. They were not considered
individuals who could succeed or should be taken seriously.
A lot has changed since then, partly due to the
passage of two federal laws: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the
earlier Rehabilitation Act. Individuals with disabilities want, and in many
cases are expected, to be productive members of society, which includes owning
or renting property, working, paying taxes and going to the polls to exercise
their voting rights.
Yet these same successful, tax-paying New
Yorkers still cannot vote independently and privately. Many individuals who
need assistance with the current voting machines are required to have two
people, one from each major political party, go into the voting booth with
them. Can you imagine having a cozy party of three in the booth with you while
you are voting? Some individuals cannot get into their polling place because
they can’t grasp the door handles, the ramp is badly constructed or some
other barrier blocks the accessibility of the entrance. Some can’t get
accessible transportation to the polls, and some find their poll workers
uninformed and rude when they try to vote. In 2006 and 2007, many people with
disabilities had to travel up to 50 miles to find an accessible voting machine.
According to the American Association of Persons
with Disabilities (AAPD), the 2000 census reported that 1 in 5 individuals, or
20% of the population in America, has some form of a disability. That is enough
of a margin to win a presidency. Jim Dixon, AAPD National Vote Project
director, calls individuals with disabilities “The sleeping giants of
American politics.”
The disability community, however, does not
wield the political clout of other minority groups, such as senior citizens,
labor and the National Rifle Association. This is due in part to the fact that
individuals with disabilities have lower voter turnout compared to other
groups. Clearly, the above-mentioned attitudinal and physical barriers have
disempowered individuals with disabilities who have worked for decades to be
successful, productive and contributing members of society.
The most obvious example of these attitudinal
barriers has been demonstrated by New York state’s non-compliance with the
2002 federal Help America Vote Act. HAVA was enacted to help modern-ize
America’s elections. This law mandated that — first in 2006, and then
by March 2008 — there would be a disability-accessible voting machine in
every polling place, as well as public education and poll-worker training.
The disability community hoped that, with the
passage of this legislation, individuals with disabilities would finally be
“main-streamed” into the electoral process after more than 200 years.
These hopes were not realized. Because of New York’s failures, the United
States Department of Justice sued that state in March 2006 for non-compliance
with the law, noting that the Empire State ranked last in HAVA implementation.
This non-compliance, which was primarily due to
political wrangling and generally dysfunctional leadership, struck a nerve with
the disability community. It was as if individuals with disabilities were put
back on those little yellow buses, patted on the head and told their vote
didn’t matter. The disability community, led by Brad Williams of the New
York State Independent Living Council (NYSILC), fought back and persevered
despite many obstacles.
The disability community tried to get the
attention of the New York State Board of Elections in the following ways:
- By written communi- cations from disability advocates dating
back to 1999.
- By suing New York state in a federal and state court.
- By an act of civil disobedience in which more than 100
disability advocates blocked the exits of a hearing room in the New York State
Legislature when HAVA committee members refused to address disability access
issues after three meetings.
- By forming a statewide disability voting coalition: New
Yorkers with Disabilities Getting Equal Voting Access (NYDGEVA).
The most recent act by New York State Board of
Elections that the disability community considered outrageous was its attempt
to amend HR811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007,
sponsored by Representative Rush Holt (D-N.J.). This bill is designed to employ
only paperless computerized touch-screen machines that produce or require the
use of durable voter-verified paper ballots that is created and made available
for inspection and verification before a vote is cast and counted. The bill
received bipartisan support and was set for a vote from the House of
Representatives on September 6th.
On Tuesday, September 4th, around 5
p.m., NYSILC was notified that an amendment to HR811 already on Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi’s desk was ready for a vote. This amendment, written by
the New York State Board of Elections, contained language designed to suspend
the disability provisions in the Help America Vote Act for New York until 2010.
If it were to pass, it would halt any progress on disability access for three
years.
Two of the NYSILC staff, Brad Williams and
myself, made emergency calls at the end of the business day. Williams wrote a
letter opposing the amendment. Dixon, of the National Vote Project, attended
the hearing and delivered the letter on behalf of the NYSILC to Pelosi and
Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).This helped delay the decision by two days.
We used all the resources at our disposal and
mobilized the entire New York disability community, including the NYDGEVA
coalition and its 24 not-for-profit disability organizations not previously
involved in voting. We mobilized all their networks and contacted all the
centers for independent living in the state. We also had access to
Rochester’s Center for Disability Rights Web site. The center sent faxes
in bulk.
So many phone calls and faxes were generated
that we flooded the congressional voice-mail system. On September
7th we got word that the disability community had created so much
chaos in Washington that the amendment to HR811 was officially shelved. The
“non-action” protects the disability provisions in the Help America
Vote Act and requires that New York state provide one ballot-marking device per
polling place by March 2008.
The action got the attention of the New York
State Board of Elections, which invited the disability community to a meeting
on September 11th. We were finally able to offer the positive,
practical solutions we had previously proposed concerning poll-site
accessibility, selection of accessible voting machines and guidelines for
poll-worker training. The long process might have been avoided if the resources
offered by the disability community had been accepted earlier.
New York’s Board of Elections is still
internally dividedover how HAVA should be implemented. HAVA’s fate,
therefore, now lies in the hands of a federal judge, who also may rule on which
voting system should be purchased.
My colleagues and myself, however, have the
quiet satisfaction of knowing that due to the perseverance of the disability
community, we have now graduated from those little yellow school buses and now
sit at the negotiating table with other New York state power brokers.
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Susan Cohen is a project coordinator at
NYSILC and coordinator of New Yorkers with Disabilities Getting Equal Voting
Access (NYDGEVA).
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