U.S. Election Rules Rethink Required To Ensure All Disabled Voters Have Their Say

According to recent projections from Rutgers University, 38 million American citizens of voting age have a disability.

Inaccessibility, in the context of an election, can take many forms spanning both inadequate facilities at polling stations and the failure of state authorities to provide accessible alternative voting options.

Concerning the former, this may include poor physical access to polling locations, such as lack of wheelchair ramps and disabled parking, narrow doorways and poor signage.

Voting stations and ballot marking equipment may not be wheelchair accessible, while in the case of talking voting machines, polling station staff are often not trained on their operation, or how to fix technical glitches.

That’s not to mention the underpublicized experience of voters with intellectual disabilities, some of whom are barred from voting altogether in certain U.S. states.

All in all, according to a United States Government Accountability Office report relating to the 2016 presidential election, two-thirds of 137 polling places had at least one accessibility issue.

Though the decentralized voting system in the U.S. complicates the application of electoral accessibility policies, these issues are by no means solely restricted to the United States amongst western nations.

Just this past week, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) published research revealing that just one in 10 blind voters and less than half of partially sighted voters reported being able to vote independently and in secret in the General Election that took place in the U.K. in December 2019.

Vote by mail not always the answer

Despite seeing its use ramped up due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, vote by mail is no panacea for inaccessible voting. Though addressing certain safety concerns, mail-in ballots do not provide an accessible option for voters who are blind or have low vision.

Individuals with motor impairments may also be unable to independently mark their ballot and the expectation that people should be relying on help from friends and family runs counter to electoral principles of secrecy and privacy.

Online voting fragmented and disjointed across the U.S.

Electronic voting via web portals and apps is certainly a promising workaround. In this context, voters with disabilities would be able to deploy their day-to-day access tools such as screen readers to complete the task independently.

Yet, uptake of electronic voting systems is perhaps the most fragmented and differentiated area of all when it comes to access provisions for disabled voters across a variety of states.

So, while states such as Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota and West Virginia permit their citizens to cast an electronic ballot via a web portal or mobile app, almost 40% of U.S. states, including Georgia, Illinois, Maryland and New York, allow no transmission of electoral ballots whatsoever.

Despite the increasing use of leading-edge security technologies, such as biometrics and blockchain-based cryptography, widespread concerns over cyber security prevail and represent by far the largest roadblock to larger scale adoption of electronic voting systems.

Potential trade-offs between accessibility and security are never far away from discussions around innovations in web-based technology.

Last year, Oregon’s Democrat Senator Ron Wyden described voting over the internet as “the worst thing you can do in terms of election security in America, short of putting American ballot boxes on a Moscow street."

Regardless of being an obvious boon for disabled voters, electronic voting, in its current form, does indeed lack the transparency and demonstrable paper trail of its offline counterpart, leaving it vulnerable to the machinations of bad actors.

That aside, over time, rather than being settled as an accessibility issue, it is almost inconceivable that generations who have known no era pre-dating the arrival of the smartphone, will accept and readily engage with a paper-only voting system.

Though the trajectory of history favors electronic voting, the trend can also be accelerated by the very essence of America’s decentralized system.

Rather than requiring federal approval, individual states maintain the prerogative to try things out for themselves and provided that knowledge can be pooled effectively, there exists scope for experimentation and learning.

Shifting mindsets and responsibilities

At a federal level, one novel approach that could bring accessibility to the fore, albeit circuitously, would be to make voting a legal civic duty punishable by a fine for non-adherence.

Of course, such a fine could not be more than around $20 but by establishing a greater degree of citizenship responsibility, the state would be beholden to maintaining its side of the bargain, which would include making voting fully accessible.

Speaking on the Big Brains podcast on the future of voting earlier this year, Professor Anthony Fowler from the University of Chicago, a public policy expert with a particular focus on elections and political representation, outlined an interesting thesis on compulsory voting:

“You just get more public pressure, you get more widespread understanding that voting is a civic duty,” he posited.

“It’s not a privilege or a benefit I’m offering you. It’s something that everyone should do and we have to make it as easy as possible,” he continued.

“Just like the IRS can’t make it really difficult for you to file your taxes, otherwise you would have pandemonium in the streets. I think compulsory voting would be one way of actually improving the way elections are run.”

America is now hurtling towards a presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden that encapsulates the nation’s culture war against the backdrop of a global pandemic.

There remains little disabled American voters can accomplish at this late stage besides ensuring they have undertaken due diligence in understanding their options for casting their ballot.

What is certain, is that come November 4, the battle to ensure millions of voters with disabilities are not, once again, disenfranchised in 2024, resumes in earnest.