Progress or Regress? Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2020 Elections

• In Event: Unequal Access? Voting and Participation of Disabled People

Abstract

People with disabilities have faced a long history of political marginalization and exclusion in the United States, as well as in other countries. While voting is one of the most fundamental aspects of a democracy, in the U.S. barriers to voting have included laws that prohibit people under guardianship from voting independently, physically inaccessible polling places, ballots that are difficult to read or understand, and election officials who do not know how to operate accessible voting equipment or who treat voters with disabilities with a lack of respect and consideration.
This paper uses nationally representative surveys conducted after the U.S. presidential elections in 2012 and 2020 to examine the voting experiences of citizens with and without disabilities, sponsored by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The 2012 survey had 3,022 respondents and the 2020 survey had 2,569 respondents, both with oversampling of people with disabilities who represent about two-thirds of all respondents. The goal is to identify continued barriers to full participation, as well as to determine how much progress has been made for voters and potential voters with disabilities between these two elections.
Preliminary results indicate progress has been made in the experience of voting for citizens with disabilities between 2012 and 2020, but they are still more likely than voters without disabilities to experience difficulties whether voting in person or by mail ballot. We also examine the relationship of disability to treatment by election officials, voter comparisons of 2020 voting to their pre-pandemic experience, facilitators of voting, preferred method of voting in the next election, and other topics.

Authors

• Lisa Schur, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Mason Ameri, Rutgers University

• Meera Adya, Syracuse University

• Douglas Kruse, Rutgers University