Barriers for 40.2 Million Voters with Disabilities

Admin voters with disabilities, Louisiana new voting restrictions, Louisiana voter fraud, Americans with disabilities voting, eligible voters with disabilities in battleground states

New laws to protect the 2024 presidential are creating barriers for Americans with disabilities, disability rights advocates have told CBS News and others.

More than 20 states now restrict mail-in ballots. This includes limiting the kinds of assistance a voter can ask for which restrict the ability of caregivers to help prepare a ballot for the people they care for. Some laws threaten criminal charges for aides who help the disabled vote. Many new laws are the aftereffect of the 2020 elections when former President Donald Trump questioned the security of mail-in voting.

About 7.1 million eligible voters with disabilities live in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed a series of laws aimed at increasing the state’s so-called “election integrity.” One of the laws makes it illegal to assist more than one person with filling out, mailing, or witnessing an absentee ballot unless those being helped are immediate family members. That places caregivers and those at assisted living, nursing, or group home facilities at risk of criminal charges. There are 1.1 million Louisiana voters with disabilities.

These new laws appear in violation of the Voting Rights Act which says that someone with the disability has the right to choose whoever they want to assist them in the voting process.

In the case of Louisiana these new restrictions are suspicious. The Secretary of State’s office has seen only three instances of voter fraud since 2016.

In the Detroit area of Michigan researchers with Detroit Disability Power and the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, found full accessibility in only 16% of polling places surveyed across Wayne County and certain cities in Oakland and Macomb counties.

A national study from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that 40% of Americans with disabilities voted in 2020 yet nearly 11% of them reported some type of difficulty. That number rose to 14% in 2022. This problem has been exacerbated due to recent restrictions in voting absentee from home since casting a ballot at polling places has perils.

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