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Voters with disabilities demand greater access to polls
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Monday, September 27, 2004
By Karen MacPherson,
or 202-662-7075
Post-Gazette National BureauWASHINGTON -- Advocacy groups for the disabled are making a last-minute push to persuade Congress to approve millions of dollars to ensure equal access for all voters.
The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, authorizes Congress to spend $650 million in fiscal year 2005, which begins Friday. President Bush has requested only $65 million, however, and Congress has yet to act on that request.
The money is supposed to be spent to improve access to polling places and voting machines for the disabled. The voting law also was designed to make major improvements to the nation's election system to prevent a repeat of the problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida.
In an effort to persuade lawmakers to act before the Nov. 2 general election, advocates for the disabled, led by United Cerebral Palsy, have created a "Don't Block My Vote" campaign to push Congress to approve all $650 million this year. The money is the latest installment of funding to implement the voting law, which calls for every polling place to be accessible and have at least one accessible voting machine.
The "Don't Block My Vote" campaign also is designed to spotlight the need for disabled people to register to vote. So far, more than 10,000 letters have been sent to Congress as part of the campaign, according to United Cerebral Palsy officials.
While advocates for the disabled acknowledge that congressional action on the funding is unlikely to lead to any accessibility improvements in this election, they say it's still important to get lawmakers on the record about the issue.
"Clearly we are taking advantage of this election season to get some attention on this issue," said Stephen Bennett, president and CEO of United Cerebral Palsy. "We're spending all this money for the elections in Iraq, and yet we won't even spend money on stuff that we need to do here in the United States."
Jim Dickson, vice president of governmental affairs of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said he expects that Congress will eventually approve all of the money for fiscal 2005. "But the question is, how long will Congress delay in doing that?" he added.
If Congress acted fairly quickly, Dickson said, he believes some of the money could be spent for the Nov. 2 election in ways such as expediting the processing of voter registration applications and hiring more poll workers.
According to United Cerebral Palsy officials, more than 45 million people with disabilities in the United States are eligible to vote. Yet many often are discouraged from voting because of problems with accessibility, both in getting into a polling place and in using voting machines, they said.
In 2000, for example, more than 20 million eligible voters with disabilities failed to cast a ballot, according to United Cerebral Palsy officials. Figures compiled by the American Association of People with Disabilities indicate that Pennsylvania has an estimated 1.9 million eligible voters with disabilities, of whom 837,397 voted in 2000.
Despite the passage of the voting law two years ago, change has come slowly and 75 percent of all counties in the United States will be using the same voting machines they used in the 2000 election, Bennett added.
Efforts to make voting machines more accessible, as required by the law, have become mired in the controversy in numerous states over how well the new computerized machines work, and whether there should be a paper ballot generated as well to ensure that votes aren't lost or tampered with.
In addition, many polling places remain inaccessible to disabled voters, advocates for the disabled say. For example, in Allegheny County, 260 out of 1,307 polling sites still are inaccessible. Another 1,000 polling places in Pennsylvania outside of Allegheny County also are inaccessible, according to local advocates for the disabled.
"People are fighting over voting machines, paper trails and types of ballots," Bennett said. "There is a process for dealing with these things in each local community.
"However, someone, somewhere, needs to take some responsibility" to ensure accessibility for disabled voters, he added. "This is a key issue, and the fact that we haven't taken care of this [issue] this year is a public embarrassment to democracy around the world."
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