Election Accessibility: Responses to Accommodation Requests by Disabled Voters

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

Abstract

As of the 2020 presidential election, disabled voters in need of accommodations when voting are instructed to contact their local election officials to ensure their access to the ballot thus creating an unofficial system of accessibility provision that is not included in existing evaluations of election accessibility. Through an email audit experiment of local election officials, I evaluate the effectiveness of this informal system by measuring the comparative responsiveness of local election officials to requests for information about voting from home in the 2020 presidential election with and without requests for an accommodation needed because of their disability as well as the quality of their responses. I find that while there is some variance in the responsiveness of local election officials to requests for accommodations by disabled voters, in conditions where the disability is explicit and the requested accommodation requires more work to provide local election officials are less likely to respond to the request and when they do, they take longer to do so. These results raise considerable questions about the reasonableness of the use of such an informal method of accommodation provision in elections particularly in light of the long-reported difficulties disabled voters face when voting in the United States.

Author

• Mandi Eatough, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor