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We Should Not Have to Risk Our Lives to Vote

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While every election is important, the outcome of the November Presidential election promises to be a turning point for America. As a disabled individual, the next four years can drastically alter my participation in society. From Medicare to COVID-19 policies, any funding cuts for the disabled community can be life-threatening. The success of every disabled person depends on voters turning out to #CriptheVote and control our future. However, COVID-19 is significantly decreasing the opportunities for disabled individuals to vote safely and independently.

Voting in person poses a health risk for those with compromised immune systems. The simple solution is that disabled voters turn to absentee ballots or curbside voting. While I am extremely privileged to have this option, my family friend who is blind faces numerous obstacles. In June, she voted absentee successfully, but only because of her own ingenuity. My friend voted by using a magnifying glass with a paper ballot. This painstaking and belittling experience could have been easily avoided, but Iowa failed her.

For the 54,000 visually impaired Iowans, voting from home is completely inaccessible. Iowa offers large print voter registration forms, but that is the end of their accommodations. Visually impaired voters or those with fine motor issues rely on accessible voting machines at polling places to cast their ballot. However, multiple individuals touching this equipment while being exposed to several people at polling locations is extremely dangerous. Asking disabled voters to risk their lives when they could easily vote from home with accessible absentee ballots is ridiculous, ignorant, and inexcusable.

Accessible absentee ballots are blank ballots that can be sent electronically, read by a screen reader, and then filled out with marking tools on a computer. Once completed, these ballots can be printed and mailed like any other absentee ballot. These ballots can be sent through established systems, such as Democracy Live and Five Cedars, or a state’s online portal. This accessible technology guarantees that disabled individuals can vote privately and independently, as is required by the Help America Vote Act.

Some concerns within the technology community are that sending ballots through an online portal can be easily hacked. However, they completely ignore the fact that every state provides electronic ballots for military and overseas voters. Many states merely attach a ballot to an email for these voters, which is much more dangerous than systems being provided for the disabled community. For example, Democracy Live uses an AWS system which has a FedRamp certification. Systems with this certification are approved for use by federal security and intelligence agencies.

As Iowa already provides electronic ballots, they have the technology readily available to apply to the disabled community. COVID-19 has already forced abled-bodied individuals to move to telehealth, remote work, and online education, which were all previously denied for the disabled community. The disabled community deserves to receive the accommodations they need, when they need them. Not only after a global pandemic reveals that online alternatives are credible and successful. Accessible absentee ballots are the next step to ensuring the disabled community has equal access to the vote in November. As the largest minority group in America, the disabled community has the potential to overwhelm this election with our political ideas about our own bodies and lives. I vote because of my disability, but Iowa prohibits absentee voters because of their disabilities. Iowa must implement accessible absentee ballots to ensure all of my community can contribute their voices to our future.

Caucus Access for All

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This Fourth of July, Americans will come together to celebrate our independence and the incredible patriots who made it possible. But those patriots were not just wealthy landowners in powdered wigs. Patriots come in all shapes and sizes. They are found on our battlefields, in the backs of buses, or in the hallways of a nursing home. They are anyone who holds in their heart the values of independence for all and insist on making those values central to the American experience. And two such patriots helped to provide the independence for a generation of people with disabilities

This month people with disabilities celebrate our own landmark of independence, the Supreme Court’s Olmstead Decision. Two women with mental health challenges had long sought to live and work in the community, and were continually denied that opportunity. Forced to living in a hospital setting despite these wishes, they went to court and fought for their right to receive government services in a setting of within the community, a right to the essential supports that allow people with disabilities to live lives of their choosing. Such a decision is what allowed thousands of American’s with disabilities to leave nursing homes, and live as fully independent members of the community.

As we celebrate our independence this week, we must take the time to think of the millions for whom it remains is an elusive, unreachable goal. Take time to acknowledge those who remain needlessly segregated and restricted in institutions, live under unnecessary guardianships or even feel just by being a person with a disability that their choices are less important. Independence was won by those who came before us and must be won continually, an evolution which will allow our nation to one day finally embody the lofty principles on which it was founded.

But we also have time to be thankful for how far we have already come. To think of those brave women who made the Olmstead Decision possible, and in doing showed as a way to our independence. People with disabilities and our nation made better for their bravery.

The Iowa Caucus: an exercise in privilege

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The Iowa caucus is a beloved statewide institution and for good reason. I remember my first caucus at 17. I was wildly excited, passionate, and eager to present myself as a thoughtful political junkie wise beyond his years. I gleefully joined in the good-natured ribbing and cajoling central to the caucus process. It was exciting, and I felt privy to a unique expression of our state’s sense of community, history, and folksy charm. At its best, it was like a snapshot from a simpler time. Rockwellian Democracy in practice. The caucus is a charming part of our state’s legacy, and once every few years, it places our state in a position of national prominence any state would envy. The Iowa caucuses are special and they are also inexcusably, fundamentally wrong.

As they currently exist, the Iowa caucus is an exercise in privilege. They are inaccessible to the working single mother, and the low income college student holding down two jobs. The caucus is inaccessible to the time poor, those without transportation, the elderly and the disabled. Often marginalized people need the protections and support of the government the most. They are the voices heard little and valued less. Even excluding the attendance requirements, the caucuses are crowded, loud, rowdy setups which preclude participation for many on the spectrum, or whose mental illnesses make public engagement an emotionally draining activity. Breakout groups established to discuss candidates or platforms make planning with microphones for those with hearing disabilities nearly impossible. Extensive documentation that can’t be accessed by adaptive technology often utilized by those with visual disabilities or platform procedures that fail to take any disabled population fully into account make the process even more inaccessible. A bloated, bureaucratic tangle of needlessly complex systems discourages participation and prevents clarity. The issues go on and on. Beneath the folksy image is a broken system that actively excludes huge populations within our state. The caucus and its faults persist and they are for me personally hurtful.

I have the hips of an aging Golden Retriever, and arthritis that would make an octogenarian wince. Yet I am expected to roll the dice, and hope my chronic pain issues align with a caucus schedule. Should my disability prevent my attendance, then it is simply written off as a price of the caucus system. I do not accept that. In February, the dice didn’t roll my way. I was unable to attend the Iowa caucuses. The nature of my transportation and the limitations of my disability made physical attendance impossible. It did not matter that I am deeply passionate about politics, or that I was eager to support my chosen candidate. My physical attendance was compulsory, and that prerequisite excluded me from my political party, and from having a political voice.

This is the 21st century. I can play video games with a friend in Beijing, order shoes, and watch an entire season of Stranger Things without moving an inch. We have all the means in the world to create an accessible system. Yet we do not. In fact, we barely have begun to flirt with remote caucus options that, even if adopted, would only scratch the surface of these issues. Why? Because Iowa is first in the nation. That affords leaders in both major parties a unique position of power, made kingmakers on the national scale. Relevant only as long as our place is maintained, and our caucus unchanged so as not to lose our place. Revealing that state parties are all too willing to accept the disenfranchisement of Iowan’s with disabilities, individuals with mental illness, the elderly and working poor for the sake of preserving familiar structures of power. Values of inclusivity and true democracy are giving way to the allure of nepotism and prestige.

Traditions that discriminate against large, marginalized populations are never quaint and they are not a point of pride. They are shameful and merit change. Last month, I was denied the right to vote in my chosen party’s future because I am a person with a disability. This state’s political parties had the means to facilitate inclusive participation policies, and elected instead to preserve the status quo. For this and a hundred other reasons, the caucus must end and in its place, a multi-day, remote and inclusive system of participation must be created. Because by preserving our spot as first in the nation through the active exclusion of thousands, we prove ourselves unworthy of the privilege. We must change and should that mean the loss of relevance for those who willingly silence the marginalized, I say all the better.