Despite high turnout among people with disabilities in the last presidential election, systemic barriers to accessibility still exist. Efforts are now underway in several states in the South to examine voting policies that make it harder for disabled people to cast a ballot. (Photo by Lorie Shaull via Flickr.)  

In the 2020 elections, turnout among voters with disabilities reached unprecedented numbers. According to the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey, approximately 62% of voters with a disability participated in the November 2020 election, compared to just about 56% in the 2016 presidential election. This was largely due to states adopting policies that made it easier to cast a ballot during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in many places, voters with disabilities still face major obstacles to casting a ballot. According to a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress titled " Enhancing Accessibility in U.S. Elections," 1 in every 9 disabled voters faced some sort of barrier to accessing the ballot box in the 2020 elections. CAP also found that people with disabilities were nearly 7 percentage points less likely than non-disabled people to participate in that year's elections, even after adjusting for age. Barriers to voting faced by people with disabilities include overly complicated mail-in voting rules, physically inaccessible in-person voting and registration sites, and election materials that can be difficult to comprehend.

While 26% of adults in the U.S. have some type of disability, the percentage of people living with disabilities is highest in the South, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in 1.2 million more disabled people nationwide by the end of 2021, according to other CAP research.

" Policymakers must work closely with voters and advocates representing varied disabilities and interests to determine all the ways that existing election systems are inaccessible," Mia Ives-Rublee, director of CAP's Disability Justice Initiative and co-author of the report, said at the time of the accessibility report's release. " There must be a sense of urgency to fix these problems before the next major election."

Voting rights advocates point out that the same vote-suppressing tactics that many Republican-controlled Southern state legislatures have implemented to undermine turnout in communities of color have also impeded voting by people with disabilities. Last year alone, for instance, 19 states enacted 34 laws to make voting harder, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Many of these laws specifically targeted mail-in voting — which data shows was the most common method of casting a ballot among disabled voters during the 2020 election. Voter ID laws, early-voting restrictions, polling place closures, and limits on curbside voting and ballot drop boxes also disproportionately impact voters with disabilities.

Efforts including lawsuits and an investigative task force are now underway in states across the South to expand access to the ballot for voters with disabilities:

Benjamin Barber is the democracy program coordinator at the Institute for Southern Studies.

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