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Are we really living under the ADA? It's a national embarrassment: the latest U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey shows that a mere 27 percent of polling places in the 2008 election were accessible to people in wheelchairs.
We're not talking accessibility to the neighborhood ice cream store, or curb cuts so wheelchair users can reach the community pool (although there certainly should be access to both); we are talking about the very foundation of our democratic system being denied to a group of voters with disability.
People in wheelchairs are not a tiny number of the population. The National Health Interview Survey on Disability found that in 1994-95, 1.6 million Americans used wheelchairs outside of an institutional setting, the last year for which I could find statistics. If perhaps a million of those were eligible adult voters, that would imply that up to 600,000 people in wheelchairs found it impossible to fulfill their duty, their obligation and their basic right in a free society.
How ironic that someone might have fought in Iraq to ensure a democratic society, paid the price by losing their legs, then come back to the U.S. only to find that voting in a presidential election in their own country was impossible.
And it goes farther than that. Poll workers are so poorly trained in how to deal with people having disabilities (we're talking 54 million citizens), that in some polling places, the accessible voting device never got turned on. In many more, poll workers showed "poor etiquette" that discouraged people with disabilities from voting once they reached the polling place.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From Disaboom:
