My friend Julia Metraux at Mother Jones wrote a good piece on the (in)accessibility of voting for disabled people.
“Disabled people faced a myriad of hurdles to voting during the midterm elections, reflecting both apathy in accommodating marginalized people across the country and voter suppression in states that have sought to deliberately throw up physical and bureaucratic challenges to the process,” she wrote on November 7.
According to Metraux, some 40 million people with disabilities in America are eligible to vote. The attacks by Republicans to curtail mail-in voting disenfranchises many people with disabilities for myriad reasons. Even so, there remain considerable barriers to access at every point in the voting process. “Disabled voters are unable to access the right to vote in every state, in many circumstances, in every county, at every polling place,” Casey Doherty, a policy analyst for the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, said to Metraux in an interview.
As I wrote last week regarding Pope Leo’s vote, the electoral process tightly, and inextricably, intersects with accessibility and technology. Mail-in voting is a godsend to me and others like me, but there remain problems with access at every step. Whatever issues paper ballots entail—and there are many, to be sure—this push by many conservatives to hamper mail-in voting sorely undervalues its benefits to people, including the disability community.
