Since 2020, American voters have seen an increase in the use of mail-in ballots as major cities like Philadelphia adopted the systems during the global pandemic. Alongside it, and likely unknown to many, the country has also seen more Americans with disabilities exercising their right to vote.
17.7 million disabled Americans reported voting in 2020, and yet, this still only accounts for almost a quarter of the adult disabled population of the U.S.
Philadelphia is home to one of the highest populations of people with disabilities compared to other major U.S cities, around 17%, according to the city’s Office for People with Disabilities – an office just made permanent in the city government in last year’s election.
As the next presidential election draws nearer, local disability advocacy groups like Liberty Resources have offered voting resources to the community they serve to encourage greater voter turnouts.
Lauren Alden has served as a director at Liberty Resources for 14 years and three presidential elections, and witnessed how the city has and hasn’t adapted for its disabled citizens.
Would you say that disabled Philadelphians are supported enough in this city to participate in voting?
Yes, I’d say it’s getting better. The hope is that we just continue to move forward with making voting access easier and something that is open to all folks – like ever since we started doing mail in voting in around 2020, with no questions asked. Before, you had to have something to explain your absentee ballot, but now you can use mail-in votes, and that’s been a huge, huge improvement for the disability community, mostly for immunocompromised folks who just can’t get out.
There’s some issues surrounding the mail-in voting that has actually very recently been addressed, and that was: who can be the designated agent to bring your ballot to the mailbox, if you can’t bring it yourself. Within the past couple of weeks, the state has made it so one person can be a designated agent for multiple people, whereas before, that was not the case. So if someone’s like a home health care worker, or say, someone who works in a nursing home, they can bring multiple ballots to the mailbox, as long as they have multiple designated forms signed by these folks. But before [if] we brought more than one, it was considered fraud. Little pieces like that have been making it just easier, where before, you folks didn’t even realize, or were scared they’d be committing fraud simply by asking their home health care worker or attendant to bring the ballot to the mailbox, not realizing that that person may be bringing a ballot for someone else. So just making it less focused on fraud for our community and more focused on suppression.
I’m a part of Rev Up Philly, which is a disability-focused “get out and vote” campaign. We talk a lot with our coalition about voter suppression being the issue over voter fraud. Even though a lot of times people are pushing that voter fraud is a problem. And we point to all the bills that are out there federally, at least, to suppress a vote for mostly marginalized groups. You know, it’s bills about different IDs in different states, [having] what ID and, even for folks who are being reintroduced, who were incarcerated, there’s lots of stuff that’s suppressing their votes. So we talk a lot about in our coalition, the suppression of all the marginalized groups’ votes.
Particularly [in] Philly when it comes to in-person voting, it’s getting better, like every polling location has to be accessible, but there’s some places that aren’t normally accessible, but during the election, when it’s when it’s a polling place, they have to put, say, a temporary ramp, right? So there’s some locations like that, where it’s being made accessible. But we find that like sometimes those places, the poll workers aren’t trained or don’t put the ramp out. Our fear is that you have, maybe, a wheelchair user who’s an introvert who goes to vote – the ramps not out. They don’t want to be the one to say, ‘Hey, you got to pick a ramp out.’ So they just turn around and go home. So we just remind folks that if you’re one of these locations where you go and you notice it’s not accessible, because the temporary ramp is not out … [we] make sure folks know that they have to have their ramp down right before the polls open.
Another thing that we found too is poll workers being not fully trained or aware of how the accessible ballot marking devices work, that are part of these new machines for folks who are blind. The machines are accessible, which is wonderful, but if the poll workers aren’t aware of how it works, that’s a problem.
I went one year ago – and this is not Philly, this is Montgomery county that I’m talking about right now – I went to vote and the machine was not up, and none of the poll workers knew how to put it up and make it accessible. So if someone who was blind was coming in to vote at that time, they would have not been able to easily go in and out, like I would have been able to vote. They would have had to wait for their county commissioner or someone from the Board of Elections would have been called to try to come and fix the machine. Their voting process is therefore not as equal as mine, as an able bodied person, [it] would be potentially hours, you know? Same goes for Philly. What we found is like poll workers aren’t often fully aware of how the machines, the accessible aspects of the machine, work. So we’d love to see a more vibrant training on that.
What do you often hear when someone comes to you looking for help with voting?
We often hear about people needing rides. We’ve partnered with other wards and get, like, accessible vans on days of election, and a lot of that has to do with someone who’s like, ‘I can’t, depending on the day and maybe the disability, I can’t take the bus there, or I can’t rely on my paratransit ride because it’s always late to get me there,’ and they really want to make sure they have a plan to vote. So they often really want to make sure they have an accessible ride available to them. So often it’s about rides to the polls.
Other than that, it’s really people asking about who they should vote for. So obviously I can’t tell them that. But what we do at Rev Up Philly is tell people, if you’re voting along the lines of your community, if you’re looking at what candidates are more focused on accessibility and disability related issues, then we can give you a voter guide, which is nonpartisan, but it really has a lot to do with people asking about like candidates opinions on accessibility or history, if they’re you know incumbents on what they voted on before.
What about for mail-in ballots?
People get a little confused with the privacy envelope or the second envelope that goes in. So we do like info sessions every election year, we have been: ‘this is exactly how you need to do your mail-in ballot,’ because there is confusion about it and you could easily get it wrong. So we would love to see some improvements on that end.
Polls themselves are ADA compliant, but the areas surrounding the polls – can you count on them to be maintained?
[That’s] why people are asking for rides that are reliable, because their paratransit rides are not reliable, because that can take them door to door, right? Because they can’t rely on the sidewalk to be in good shape, or the curb cuts to be even there, even though they’re supposed to be. Sometimes just getting to the polls is something that has [to be] planned ahead.
What have previous big elections, like the presidential election, been like to your memory?
There’s some statistics, like if all folks with disability voted [in 2016,] and we voted for a candidate that is more concerned about the disability community, [we would sway the vote.] And that’s actually like our big push this year, is just the power of the disability vote. We’re a major voting block, but we need our voting block to acknowledge that, we need our folks to get out and vote. There’s around 250,000 people with disabilities in Philadelphia alone. And then, I think it’s like one out of every four folks in the United States have a disability. So again, huge voting block. But it’s about voter education. People knowing their rights that their polling place has to be accessible and to make sure it is. We’re trying to push the ‘power of the people’ thing this year, this election.
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