“They mentioned it was locked for safety causes, however you may’t each lock one thing for safety causes and name it the accessible entrance,” Ms.
“They mentioned it was locked for safety causes, however you may’t each lock one thing for safety causes and name it the accessible entrance,” Ms. Ladau, 29, mentioned. “Small issues like this add up and ship a message that people who find themselves working the polls don’t actually care about giving folks with disabilities the identical sort of entry as nondisabled voters.”
The boundaries don’t cease on the door. Polling websites are required to have accessible voting machines — as an illustration, ones that may learn textual content aloud for folks with visible disabilities — however a number of voters recalled exhibiting up for previous elections and being informed that the one accessible machine was damaged, or that ballot employees didn’t know learn how to function it.
Stacy Cervenka and her husband, who reside in Lincoln, Neb., are blind and usually vote in individual utilizing accessible machines. However Ms. Cervenka, 40, mentioned they have been hesitant this 12 months as a result of their son has a metabolic dysfunction that places him at excessive threat for Covid-19. And since they solely lately moved to Nebraska, they don’t have household or pals close by to assist them full mail-in ballots.
“There actually isn’t any nice choice,” Ms. Cervenka mentioned. “We wish to have the ability to vote in individual as a lot as anybody else, however we wish it to be protected. It’s actually going to rely the place the numbers are in November if we do this, and if not, we’re going to need to discover a trusted one that we really feel snug studying us all of the poll measures and marking them accurately.”
Traditionally, incapacity rights have been a bipartisan difficulty. The Individuals with Disabilities Act was launched by Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a Democrat, and signed into legislation by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, in 1990. However latest discussions of incapacity coverage have come overwhelmingly from Democrats.
Throughout the presidential main, greater than 10 Democratic candidates launched disability-related plans, lots of them extra sweeping than something proposed in earlier campaigns. (President Trump has not printed such a plan.) A number of advocates mentioned that surge in consideration had made the obstacles to voting this 12 months tougher to swallow.
Rebecca Cokley, director of the Incapacity Justice Initiative on the Heart for American Progress, mentioned it had been thrilling to see Democrats have interaction with folks with disabilities on Twitter and embody them within the technique of writing insurance policies, and to observe candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro flip broad debate questions into ones particular to the incapacity group.