Elections Have Gotten More Accessible for Disabled Voters, but Gaps Remain

In 2018, Kenia Flores, who is blind, voted by mail in North Carolina because she was attending college out of state. Had she been able to vote in person, she could have used an accessible machine. But voting absentee, her only option was to tell another person her choices and have them fill out her ballot. She had no way to verify what they did.

Dessa Cosma, who uses a wheelchair, arrived at her precinct in Michigan that year to find that all the voting booths were standing height. A poll worker suggested she complete her ballot on the check-in table and got annoyed when Ms. Cosma said she had a right to complete it privately. Another worker intervened and found a private space.

That night, Ms. Cosma — the executive director of Detroit Disability Power, where Ms. Flores is a voting access and election protection fellow — vented to the group’s advisory committee and discovered that “every one of them had a story about lack of ability to vote easily, and we all had different disabilities,” she said. “It made me realize, ‘Oh wow, even more than I realized, this is a significant problem.’”

It has been for decades. A series of laws — including the Help America Vote Act in 2002, or HAVA, which created new standards for election administration and grant programs for states to maintain those standards — have sought to make it easier. And they have, but major gaps remain.

That is illustrated in a new report to the federal Election Assistance Commission, to be released Thursday by six researchers from Rutgers University and one from San Diego State University.

The report, provided to The New York Times, looked at elections through the 20th anniversary of HAVA in 2022 and found that the law had generally improved accessibility. The shift was reflected both quantitatively (in turnout and the percentage of people reporting trouble voting) and qualitatively (in voters’ responses in focus groups).