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Victoria Brown thinks Florida has failed the disabled when it comes to voting rights. The president of the National Alliance of the Disabled and a Florida resident, Brown has a neuromuscular disease, uses a
wheelchair, and is legally blind. But she felt she couldn't go to the polls on Nov. 7 to cast her ballot.
That's because not a single county in the Sunshine State uses electronic voting booths, which feature touch screens and headphones for the disabled. In fact, only 12 counties in the entire nation use these readily available devices. "Once again, people with disabilities were ignored at the polling places," says Brown.
Brown isn't exaggerating when she says a community of tens of millions of Americans has to struggle to vote. Only one state in the country, Rhode Island, publishes a Braille version of the voting guide and tactile ballots. And out of 152,000 polling places, 29,000 are still inaccessible to wheelchair users, despite a federal law mandating such accessibility by 1986.
No one knows precisely what percentage of the 11 million to 14 million registered disabled voters in the country made it to the polls. But people with disabilities who worked on getting the vote out -- the goal was to turn out 1 million disabled voters -- say they were disappointed with a lower-than-expected result.
ALL TALK? The political parties themselves likewise dropped the ball in this election. In their massive phone drives, neither big party bothered to use Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf (TDD) to reach the hearing impaired. Neither the Gore nor the Bush campaign purchased the TDD phone directories that most major phone companies sell for $35 or $40 apiece.
In fact, when I asked them, the Bush and Gore campaign officials responsible for disability issues confessed they didn't even know that these directories existed. And for all his sensitivity to social issues, the progressive campaign of Ralph Nader likewise failed the TDD test.
The irony is that during this election, the two main Presidential candidates both spoke more extensively than ever before on disability issues. But those supportive words belied a campaign effort that left out a significant proportion of the estimated 1 million Floridians with disabilities. In fact, disability advocates swear a better outreach effort could have swung the state decisively to either Al Gore or George Bush.
Regardless of who emerges victorious, the next President should focus on making elections far more accessible to the disabled community. Here's what they need to do: The federal government should earmark additional funding to county election boards. That money could help offset the cost of adding electronic voting machines, which currently cost twice as much as traditional balloting machines. That's prohibitive for counties but would consume only a tiny fraction of the federal surplus.
TRACKING PROBLEMS. And the government should fund experiments in Internet-based elections, perhaps using Net appliances at polling stations. These appliances cost much less than conventional voting machines and could be easily programmed to fulfill the needs of the deaf, visually impaired, and mobility-impaired. Many states stand poised to approve these new online voting systems, and federal dollars would edge them toward that decision (see BW Online, "A Vote for Online Ballots")
Funds should also be provided to cover the cost of printing Braille ballots for blind absentee voters. As part of matching funding to political campaigns, the federal government should mandate the installation and use of TDD devices on party phone banks. A single TDD device costs less than $200 -- installing several dozen would cost many times less than a single television spot.
To be sure, many election problems simply arise from a failure to understand the needs of the disabled. For example, Florida neglected to provide wheelchair-height voting tables. As a result, a person using a wheelchair in Palm Beach County could not look down and visually track across the ballot surface with the same accuracy as a standing person. Brown says some people using wheelchairs inadvertently punched in the second slot for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan (an opponent of the Americans with Disabilities Act) when they intended to vote for Democrat Al Gore (who supports the ADA).
TAKING IT TO COURT. The table problem could have been cheaply and easily fixed if Palm Beach had bothered to get input from the disability community. It didn't. County officials likewise failed to run butterfly ballots -- designed to help the visually impaired -- past representatives from that community, according to Brown and Palm Beach disability attorney Fred Shotz. The ballot "was a major problem for people with visual impairments, developmental disabilities, cognitive disabilities, and people using wheelchairs," says Shotz.
A dozen disabled voters are considering filing a lawsuit in the Florida Circuit Court. The suit would allege that the Presidential election violated Title II of the ADA and Florida law, which requires all polling places to be fully accessible. These voters are discussing a joint suit with the Democrats.
Perhaps such a suit would catalyze concrete actions to alleviate voting-access issues. Without some resolution, the very politicians who are so loudly declaring that every vote counts would lose even more credibility in the eyes of a disabled community that they've already failed to serve.
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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