I keep finding more articles on disability and voting. I’ll keep sharing them. Also, it’s good to revisit the marriage penalties issue.
Here are your three disability-related links for Thursday, April 25, 2024.
1. Voting Experiences Since HAVA: Perspectives of People with Disabilities
U.S. Election Assistance Commission - April 18, 2024
“Difficulties still exist for voters with disabilities, but the agency hopes the ongoing research done by the EAC and Rutgers University spotlights the progress election officials have made while acknowledging where there is still work to be done.”
There’s been a lot of improvement in voter accessibility, but still not enough. That’s what I gather from this report. The other equally important takeaway for other readers is simply the fact that reputable researchers have been doing high-quality work on disabled people’s voting habits and access experiences for a long time now. So the disabled Americans’ relationship with voting is not at all a mystery. That’s important. People still tend to assume that disability questions are unexplored and opaque. That might have been the case 30 or more years ago. But we know a lot more now about a lot of disability-related topics — including voting and voting accessibility. So if we neglect, reject, or roll back steps to improve disabled people’s engagement in politics, we can’t claim ignorance about it.
2. Churches Don’t Have to Be Accessible. That’s Bad News For Voters.
Julia Métraux, Mother Jones - April 23, 2024
Source: LinkedIn.
“Election officials ‘should be striving for locations that are already completely ADA compliant,’ Michelle Bishop, the National Disability Rights Network's voter access and engagement manager, told Mother Jones, but it also the case that ‘a lot of the places that are willing to serve are churches.’”
The focus here is on why it can be a particular problem for disabled voters when communities rely heavily on churches to act as polling places during elections. But the piece is also a good summary of the whole broader topic of accessible voting. For what it’s worth, my polling place for the last several elections has been a former Catholic school adjacent to an affiliated Catholic church. And it’s fully accessible — probably because being built as a grade school after the 1960s, some degree of basic accessibility was the default. And it may be that the site was chosen because it is accessible, in a mostly residential neighborhood with few other options that would serve well as a public meeting place, accessible or not. How accessible are your polling places? How do they get chosen?
3. Disability Benefits and the Marriage Penalty
Barbara and Jim Twardowski, RN, Muscular Dystrophy Association - February 12, 2024
Source: Steve Wright on X (Twitter)
“Culturally, Americans have seen inequalities in marriage rights before. We have seen the laws change to allow interracial marriages and, more recently, same-sex marriages … Marriage equality for the disability community is somewhat different. While disabled people are not prohibited from marrying, the rules to qualify for government benefits penalize those who do marry.”
I have written a couple of times at Forbes.com about the “marriage penalties” built in to U.S. benefits regulations. This article provides a good overview, with some very relatable, personal examples involving actual disabled couples who can’t marry because they would lose benefits they must have in order to live, and live independently. I think it’s worth noting that there are penalties associated with SSDI, the benefit related to past work experience, as well as SSI, which is based on income irrespective of past employment. But the broader point is the same. And it all suggests that fixing this aspect of U.S. disability benefits should be easy. Almost nobody thinks it’s good or right for benefits rules to discourage disabled people from marrying.
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