Query from this week’s bulletin:
10--16--2011 Are we conscientious in fulfilling obligations to the state and society while opposing those contrary to our understanding of the leadings of God?
I was going to write about voting even before reading this week’s queries. I consider voting both a great privilege and an obligation. For now I would like to concentrate on accessibility.
Partly to that end, here is some basic information about people with disabilities and voting. It is current as of the 2011 election season in King County WA. Your mileage may vary in other jurisdictions.
The main King County Elections page
http://kingcounty.gov/elections.aspx
The page that will, when updated carry information about where to go if one wants to vote in person using one of the Accessible Voting Units.
http://kingcounty.gov/elections/voting/accessible.aspx
Accessible Voting Units are special machines with a number of different features to make voting more accessible to people who are blind or low-vision, use wheelchairs, have certain dexterity impairments. As a result of the Help America Vote act, King County bought one accessible voting unit for each polling place. This occurred about 3 years before King County switched to all mail-in voting. The introduction of this accessibility measure made A LOT of blind people really happy because it meant they could vote in private without help from a reader and sometimes multiple officials and observers. Fewer blind people weighed in about the observations from multiple computer scientists that almost every model of touch-screen voting machine raised serious concerns about auditability and other computer security issues.
In King County, the AVU has audio in English; the county is also required by the Voting Rights Act to have ballots available in Chinese and as of the 2010 census apparently also in Vietnamese. The King County AVU has audio only in English. Voters who need one of the other languages either get to use the large print (not actually very large) or bring someone to read them the ballot.
The other accessibility barrier is really a snapshot of various polling places’ ability to interact with accessibility of physical location. Lots of polling places used to be in churches. There would have to be a wheelchair-friendly pathway to the polling place but the route there can be pretty circuitous, say from a parking lot. However there is no guarantee that getting to the parking lot will be doable: one polling place in my neighborhood has NO approach that does not involve very steep hills, hills too steep for most wheelchair users. This would mean a wheelchair user must either arrange a suitable ride or vote absentee.
Presently, with vote by mail, one either solves one’s accessibility issues at home OR one works out transportation to one of usually 3 sites where there is an Accessible Voting Unit. My list of topics evoking rants is already too long, but there are opportunities here if I were to feel so led.
The Secretary of State link about accessibility issues
http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/voterswithdisabilities/Pages/InformationforVoterswithDisabilities.aspx
Speaking of civic obligation, the King County Forums are a project to have community conversations about a sequence of public policy topics in King County. I highly commend the Forums even though:
--I find parts of their website difficult to deal with at best and inaccessible at worst.
--The informational video accompanying Round 8 about transportation funding in King County had really a LOT of visual content that would be completely inaccessible to a totally blind person.
http://communityforums.org/
In the Light
(RantWoman)
A page full of graphics
http://kingcounty.gov/elections/widgets.aspx
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