When it comes to disability, our voting process is leaving people out
By Sara Mortensen
This piece is a part of our Wizard Rock the Vote series, exploring some of the issues on the ballot and the systemic problems that keep people from going to the polls. To find out more about how to get involved and support WRTV, visit thehpalliance.org/wrockthevote.
According to many Harry Potter fans, conversations around mental health and disability are conspicuously absent from the Wizarding World. How do Hogwarts and the Wizarding World at large accommodate for those who are neurodivergent, physically disabled, or suffer from mental illness? Unfortunately, it often feels as though these same conversations are lacking in our world. This issue is especially prevalent during election season. Although voting is a right that should be guaranteed to all people, our current system greatly disenfranchises people living with disabilities and/or mental illness.
Historically, people with disabilities have been disproportionately denied the right to vote since the 19th century when a majority of the states passed laws that simply did not allow them to vote. Today, the situation has unfortunately not changed very much. A majority of states still have similar legal provisions that deny the right to vote to people with “mental incapacities.” The reasons behind these restrictions include protecting the validity of the voting process and the prevention of voter fraud. However, in a time when voter fraud has been proven to be a non-issue, our society must seriously consider the consequences of voter suppression towards the disabled community and why they are being excluded in the first place. After all, voter suppression and barriers to voting have an impact: in the 2012 elections the voter turnout among people with disabilities was 5.7 percent lower than people without disabilities.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common issues facing the disabled community when it comes to voting.
What are the issues?
The first set of issues can be described as “substandard accommodations” at polling places. Examples of substandard accommodations include physical barriers such as booths that do not accommodate wheelchairs, a voting process that doesn’t accommodate the visually and hearing impaired, inadequate parking, large crowds, and long wait times.
Transportation is also an accommodation issue that greatly affects the disabled community, so polling places that are not easily accessible by public transport are included in this “substandard accommodations” category. According to a 2009 US Government Accountability Office study, more than two-thirds of polling places are not fully accessible despite federal laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Help America Vote Act.
The second big issue facing voters with disabilities is voter identification laws. These laws are currently employed in over 30 states and require that a person have “official identification” with them when they vote. While this may seem innocent enough at first glance, voter ID laws disproportionately affect people of color, the elderly, young people between ages 18 and 24, those in poverty, and — yes — people with disabilities. Research has shown that those who are disabled are more likely to be unemployed and are less likely to have a driver’s license, making it increasingly difficult for them to have a valid form of identification for Election Day. In the 2012 edition of the Pew Charitable Foundation’s Elections Performance Index, researchers found that “7.2 percent of registered voters with disabilities didn’t have photo identification, compared with 4.5 percent of their non-disabled counterparts.”
In addition, the process of obtaining proper identification can be time-consuming, difficult, and expensive. It is an unfortunate truth that about one in three people with disabilities live in poverty. This is partially due to the idea of “enforced poverty,” in which people who need aid from government assistance programs are implicitly encouraged to remain under a certain income bracket in order to continue getting assistance. The threshold for receiving government assistance is very low — meaning that making more money than the threshold can still leave people in poverty, but without assistance for essentials like food, health insurance, and childcare. This catch-22 prevents many people from working or seeking better wages. As such, the expense associated with obtaining the “official identification” necessary to vote is just one more preventing factor.
Lastly, there are more general state laws that can disqualify voters based on a judgment of “mental incompetency” by a court or “because election officials or service providers improperly screen out those they determine incompetent to vote.” These very general laws can be used to deny many the right to vote, from those in a psychiatric facility to those suffering from a range of mental illnesses and disabilities such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism.
What can you do to help?
There are many things you can do to help make voting more accessible. Here are just a few suggestions:
- You can support the work of the numerous organizations that are advocating for disability rights in our political system. Some examples include the American Association of People with Disabilities, Disability Thinking, and the conversations happening in the online campaign #CripTheVote.
- You can read and share resources like these: Resources for Voters with Disabilities and this resource that breaks down laws that affect voters with disabilities by state.
- Support efforts to strike down voter ID laws in general will also help making voting more accessible to everyone in your community.
- In your local community, you can help fill out absentee ballots or work to ensure that your local polling place is accessible to people who use wheelchairs or have other physical needs.
- You can volunteer to be a poll worker, and be on hand to assist anyone who might need it on election day.
The Harry Potter Alliance’s Wizard Rock the Vote campaign is not only about getting out the vote but about bringing awareness to various issues that affect members of our society in the context of our political system. Our country was founded on the ideals of democracy, as applied to people like our founders: land-owning white males. While we’ve made great strides towards a real democracy, there are still so many different communities of people whose right to vote is disenfranchised. If we want to truly be a democracy that represents all the varied types of people that live in the United States, then we must work to remove the numerous barriers that keep people who live with disabilities and mental illness from having a say in our country’s political decisions.
Sara is a Hufflepuff who is passionate about feminism, fan activism, and mental health advocacy. She volunteers for The Harry Potter Alliance as their Research Team Lead and works full-time at a non-profit called Words Alive that works to increase literacy in the San Diego Area. You can find her on twitter @saramrts.
