Voter suppression of the disabled and elderly
2025 02 28
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Why do disabled voters feel utterly disenfranchised? It's not just lack of financial supports or eroding healthcare ones.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who still think disability is a moral failing, a choice, an exception to the abled (read: legitimate) default, or simply laziness. So, when questions come up about voter suppression and how things like holding an election in winter when you don't have to is deliberate, sometimes the idea doesn't land with some people.
It is quite deliberate, the exclusion of the disabled. Don't think for a second choosing the month with the worst weather wasn't absolutely a choice to keep them and seniors away from the polls, to keep people without vehicles away from the polls, to keep anyone impacted by weather away from them too. So, it has to be brought up every time that we need 100% accessible voting. But we're never going to get it as long as we keep treating disability like a side quest.
Neither my returning office nor my polling station were accessible by public transit - no bus stop within an easy reach for someone with a mobility aid or vision impairment, especially on badly ploughed roads. The returning office front door was a problematic distance from the only plowhed part of the street, which left me climbing snow drifts to get in. Some peoples' polling places were hours from where they lived. Places were moved at the last minute. Some places were in areas without sidewalks at all. There wasn't enough time to do the mail-in ballots. The place I voted at does have an elevator, but it's not obvious, and the Elections Ontario signs were pointing straight up the stairs not to the elevator. There weren't enough volunteers to do mobile voting, which left a lot of people out in the cold who didn't get to vote at all. And there are still folks who are, for various reasons, unaware that you don't need the voting card to vote, nor to be registered, because how those are handled is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate their real need.
So, f you really want to do something for the next election, the federal one, take the day off work and do mobile voting for the people who can't get to the polling station.