Skip to Navigation Menu

Voting & Disability: Barriers and Legal Strategies

What if you wanted to vote, but the polling place was locked? For millions of voting age Americans with disabilities, this situation is all too real. Not because election officials are deliberately blocking disabled people from entering, but because many polling places are inaccessible. The Federal Election Commission reports that more than 20,000 polling places across the nation are inaccessible, depriving people with disabilities their fundamental right to vote.

What barriers might people with disabilities find when they vote? Examples include: polling booths set in church basements or in upstairs meeting halls with no ramp or elevator, inadequate parking, narrow doorways, someone with cerebral palsy being perceived as intoxicated, or not having access to a Braille ballot if you are blind. Poll workers may question the right of someone with a cognitive disability to vote. Many states have outmoded statutes disenfranchising people with psychiatric disabilities.

Legal Strategies to Expand Voting Rights

Opportunities exist to challenge barriers that keep people with disabilities from voting. The primary tools are the following federal laws: the ADA, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act (VAEHA), and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Photo of a woman in a wheelchair entering a polling facility A voter takes advantage of an accessible polling facility.

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA)
Title II of the ADA provides that public entities may not exclude or deny individuals with disabilities the benefits of their programs, services or activities. Four regulations are particularly relevant in the context of voting: reasonable modification, criteria that screen out people with disabilities, program access and site selection.

Reasonable Modifications
Public entities are required to provide reasonable modifications in their programs, services and activities to enable individuals with disabilities to benefit equally from the services. If a voter requires modifications due to a physical or mental disability to enable her to register to vote or cast a ballot, modifications must be provided unless they would create an undue burden or fundamental alteration. For example, a voter may need an explanation of instructions in simpler language, a ballot accessible to individuals with visual impairments, or a friend or family member to accompany him or her into a voting booth.

Criteria that Screen Out People with Disabilities
Public entities are prohibited from using eligibility criteria that tend to screen out individuals with disabilities from its programs unless those criteria are necessary to administer a program. Many states have laws that bar citizens with mental disabilities from voting, regardless of whether they are competent to do so. While a state may limit voting rights to those capable of understanding the nature of an election and what it means to cast a ballot, citizens with mental disabilities are sometimes denied the right to vote even when they do understand these things.

Program Access
People with disabilities are entitled to program access. Under this standard, every polling or registration site does not have to be accessible, as long as the voting program as a whole is accessible. If a voter cannot enter her assigned polling place or use the voting machines because of a disability, the public entity could satisfy the program access requirement by notifying her ahead of time that the site is inaccessible and, at her request, reassign her to an accessible polling place. Because the program access standard permits alternative access methods, it may be difficult to challenge public entities with inaccessible polling sites if they provide alternative voting methods such as "curbside voting" or absentee ballots to enable citizens with disabilities to vote.

Site Selection
Title II regulations prohibit a public entity, when selecting sites for a program, from making selections excluding individuals with disabilities from, denying them the benefits of, or otherwise subjecting them to discrimination in the program. The site selection provision may be used to challenge the inaccessibility of polling or registration sites selected by a public entity after January 26, 1992. Many local governments re-select polling sites every year by sending out a letter and requiring a response indicating that the site will be available as a polling site in the coming year.

National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA)
The NVRA requires states to designate as voter registration agencies: (1) all offices that are primarily engaged in providing disability services and that receive state funds, and (2) all offices providing public assistance. Such agencies must make available voter registration forms and assistance in completing them, and must accept completed applications and transmit them to state officials. Disability services offices designated as voter registration agencies include state and county offices of mental health and mental retardation, blindness and visual services offices, veterans' affairs offices, health department offices, labor department offices, aging department offices, and alcohol and substance abuse offices.

Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984 (VAEHA)
The VAEHA applies to federal elections and requires each political subdivision responsible for conducting elections to assure that all polling sites for federal elections are accessible to voters with disabilities and voters 65 and older. If the chief election officer determines that no accessible polling place is available and that the political subdivision is unable to make one temporarily accessible, an elderly or disabled voter must be reassigned to an accessible polling place or provided with an alternative means for casting an Election Day ballot.

Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)
HAVA impacts the entire voting process from voting machines and ballots to registration and poll worker training. State election officials, legislators, and advocates are responsible for making HAVA work properly. States, in order to receive federal funds, must develop a comprehensive election reform plan and enact legislation. HAVA will improve voting access to people with disabilities by:

People with disabilities are less likely than non-disabled people to vote. Would it matter if more people with disabilities voted? Of course, it's the fundamental right of all Americans to vote. But if people with disabilities voted at the same rate as the non-disabled, 10 million more votes would have been cast in the last Presidential election - a major voting bloc. Voting is power and measuring the size of any group's vote can significantly impact that group's political muscle.

Sources:


Back to Previous Page



email article
print article