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Commentary:Vote: VOTE: YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON ITBy Kathi Wolfe Last month, my friend Penny, accompanied by her guide dog Tess, entered her polling place to vote in the Maryland primary. Said a poll worker when he saw Penny: “We’re so glad you’re here! We were afraid you weren’t coming!” Why was the Montgomery Village election official so excited to see her? “I’m the only blind or visually impaired person who uses the speech function on the electronic voting machine,” she told me. The equipment has been accessible to people who are blind for four years, Penny said, adding, “It’s depressing that other people with visual disabilities aren’t taking advantage of it and voting.” The polling place, located in Montgomery County, Md., is in the Washington, D.C., area. “It’s unlikely that I’m the only blind person in my voting district,” she added. Unfortunately, Penny’s experience isn’t unique. Many of us with all kinds of disabilities from all regions of the country don’t vote. According to Vice President for Government Affairs James C. Dickson of the American Association of People with Disabilities, there are 37 and a half million Americans with disabilities of voting age. Of those, he said, only about 16 million vote. This is bad news not only for those of us who have a disability, but for our families, friends, advocates and everyone with a stake in disability issues. Speaking to me on a recent visit to his office in Washington, D.C., Dickson said, “To be a political force you have to be able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.” Reward and punishment consist of money or votes, said Dickson, who heads AAPD’s Disability Vote Project. “We people with disabilities don’t have money,” Ethan B. Ellis, executive director of the Alliance for Disabled in Action Inc., an independent living center in Edison, N.J., wrote in an e-mail message. “So we damn well better vote...early (and) often, as Justin (Dart Jr., the late disability-rights leader) told us.” As someone, who is legally blind, I agree with Ethan and Justin: This is truer than ever this election. Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that affect people with disabilities have already been cut back. “In 2005, the Missouri state legislature not only cut services but passed a law saying there will be no more Medicaid in 2008,” Dickson told me. If you’re on Medicaid and living in Tennessee, you can’t get a ventilator anymore, he said, adding, “If you’re poor and need a ventilator,” you die. In September, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Americans with Disabilities Act Businesses raised questions that could potentially weaken the ADA, Michael J. Cooper, executive director of the ENDependence Center of Northern Virginia in Arlington, Va., told me. “The composition of the Senate Judiciary Committee is vital to securing...support for candidates for the judiciary who will act in the best interest of ADA implementation at the Court of Appeals level, the federal level and at the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said. Like many of us, I’ve experienced the sadness and frustration of disability-based discrimination. It’s no fun to be asked, as I once was, to leave a coffee shop because your “blindness is depressing.” I don’t want to see the ADA weakened. If we want to have a say in our future (from Medicaid to Social Security to employment to the ADA), more of us must vote. Said Dickson: “To reach politicians, you have to demonstrate your vote. We haven’t demonstrated our vote.” Carol Westlake, executive director of the Tennessee Disability Coalition in Nashville, told me a story about how politicians are influenced by votes. In 1998, “the governor was thinking about consolidating (cutting) some departments in state government,” Westlake said. First, he tried to consolidate the state departments of labor and employment security, she said. “He wasn’t very successful because of the political pressure of the business community,” Westlake said. “Then, he said, ‘Let’s eliminate the department of mental health and mental retardation and put them into the department of health...because those people (people with disabilities) don’t vote.’” Fortunately, a secretary to the governor, who was the mother of a child with a disability, leaked what the governor had up his sleeve to the disability community, and the consolidation effort was thwarted. Not all is gloom and doom. There has been progress in getting our vote out. Forty-seven organizations participate in the Missouri Disability Vote Project, according to Dickson. “They checked their membership lists against the list of registered voters in the state,” he said. “They compared the election of 1998 to 2002, and they found that by simply calling people and asking them to vote that they’d increased the voter turnout of people with disabilities by 11 percent.” The AAPD Disability Vote Project works with disability-vote coalitions in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., Tennessee, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and California. “We’re talking to people in New York and Nebraska,” Dickson said. “Yearly, we hold a summit where people from the grass roots gather to talk about what they’ve learned about voting issues.” Two legally blind candidates (Kristen Cox in Maryland and David Paterson in New York) are running for lieutenant governor. This is a far cry from the days when Franklin D. Roosevelt hit the campaign trail. Then, FDR, who had polio, kept his wheelchair out of sight and pretended to walk. Medicare and Medicaid have been cut so much that people with a disability interest are starting to recognize that we need to vote “in order to stop budget cuts or change programs,” Dickson said. Building a disability voting bloc will be slow, he told me. But, Dickson added, “by 2010 or 2012, we’ll have built the critical mass within the disability community to pick out a ‘dirty dozen’ Congress people who screw PWD’s and defeat them. That will galvanize our community. That’s what happened with women’s rights and gay issues.” I look forward to picking out the “dirty dozen’ in 2010. But we can’t wait four years to have our say. Let’s use our power now! Vote this November. Your life depends on it. Kathi Wolfe is a free-lance writer from northern Virginia. PLEASE NOTE: PORTIONS OF THIS WEB SITE ARE UNDER CONSTRUCTION! |
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