The election is now a few short weeks away, and while people with disabilities do have an understanding of who they will be voting for, there is still the feeling of being unsure when it comes to Election Day. We are at the stage now with candidates holding final rallies, conferences, and debates, but we are also at the stage in thinking how we’re going to be able to go vote on Election Day. For this article, let’s go back to April and focus on now.
One of my first articles was on the chat that is usually held on Twitter a few times a month, hosted by @DisVisibility (the disability visibility project) and co-hosts: #CripTheVote. #CripTheVote is a chat where the disability community can interact with other people with disabilities regarding the election because every disability is not the same. Regarding the physical or mental disability that everyone has, our bodies, reactions, and needs are different. Through chats with the hashtag #CripTheVote, people with disabilities come together to voice their differences and what they are fighting for with this election. People with disabilities are known to be the largest minority in the United States because we are either born with a disability, or a disability can form at any point during our lifetime.
On April 9, 2016, a chat was hosted for #CripTheVote on the topic of Voter Accessibility, Suppression & Disenfranchisement and People With Disabilities. For this chat, the following issues were covered: access to voting registration and voting, experiences with staff at polling stations, voter ID laws, access issues, voting rights of people in institutions, voting rights of people with disabilities and mental illness, the role of conservatorship and voting rights, and linguistic/other information needs of voters with disabilities. The purpose of the #CripTheVote chats is to not only make a nonpartisan effort, but also for the disability community to share their experiences with voting as every person with a disability is not the same.
As a first time voter for the presidential candidate, the #CripTheVote chats allow me to connect and interact with other people with disabilities. The chats also help to educate as I tend to process everything much slowly than the average individual. As I have cerebral palsy and am hard of hearing, there are certain inaccessibilities that I experience whenever I go out to vote once a year. Every state has different methods to place a vote on the ballot, but for New York, it is the use of standing booths. Regardless of how it has a handicap sticker, the booths are not user friendly and there needs to be improvements for those who are either unable to stand for an extended period of time or wheelchair users. Since I turned 18 in 2010, everything has been pretty blunt and I still have a difficult time understanding certain things, especially when it comes to signing in to vote and the lack of interaction from the people working the polls. Every day, I am continuously learning, but I am the type of person who needs everything to process before it can even click.
The inspiration to give it a second try for a political article came before and during the second presidential debate. I honestly have somewhat of a pet peeve when it comes to major events and everything news related on television. It’s not that I don’t like the news or anything related to politics, but because I am hard of hearing, I tend to rely on the ease of closed captions. While closed captions are great for those who are deaf/hard of hearing, they also suck; captions are dubbed craptions due to the slowness that comes with watching anything on the news and missing pieces of information. Every time the captions go slow and the dialogue go fast, it is extremely difficult to fill in the blanks of what has been missed. Because of craptions, I tend to avoid watching anything on the news; with the debate, I have been studying the body language of both candidates.
The issues in voter accessibility does not just lie on the issues that I have had, but there are other issues that can come up. With the experiences of voting, there are mixed views of whether it is easy or hard. At first it was difficult to understand the way voting worked because in New York, it feels like you are taking a test using a scantron. For other people with disabilities, they take the option to be an absentee or mail-in voter because it is a convenient option to use instead of skipping a vote. In interaction with the polling staff, it can be mixed because while there may be people that knows you well in the area you live in, they can also be unclear with how placing mark on the ballot works. While being an absentee/mail0in voter can be seen as convenient and accessible due to the ability to place a vote from home, it can be seen as a bandaid to ignore accessibility issues that should be improved.
Regardless of how much is explained, there is still a myriad of issues with accessibility and every person with disabilities experience things differently. Voter accessibility is still a great issue that needs full attention throughout the United States. What people with disabilities need to have is a smooth experience that should not be so hard to take in as people with disabilities are also human! There needs to be more thoughts within accessibility before the 2020 election, and it still should not continue to be ignored much longer.
