[EL] ELB News and Commentary 8/2/11

Tue Aug 2 13:41:38 PDT 2011

If anybody's working on an article about disabilities and voting, please 
note that the same type of thoughts (see para. 1 below) underlie policy 
regarding people with disabilities and mass transit.Everybody gets to 
ride the same bus!No attendant required.

But: not all of the seats must flip up to accommodate wheelchairs.So the 
wheelchair-bound can never join the party in the back of the bus ... and 
might have to wait for another bus if all the wheelchair positions are 
taken (like me and my bicycle in downtown L.A. the other night since 
both bike slots were full).

Similarly, there seems to be grudging acceptance of voting at the audio 
ballot booth in the corner, and possibly waiting to use it.And as with 
transportation policy, people with cars have a more comfortable option 
-- curbside voting.

The holy grail remains brain-controlled robot arms for voting (with no 
memory that can reveal votes).If you invent those, I'd like to be your 
patent attorney.

- dah

p.s. as we move towards more all vote-by-mail elections, and since some 
people with disabilities can have normal needs, like vacations, for 
absentee balloting, we should perhaps be considering deploying voting 
assistance hardware to people's homes.and we may need the postal service 
to collect ballots from people who can't put them in mailboxes themselves.

On 8/2/2011 10:44 AM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote:
> Very interesting post from Michael Waterstone... two things that have 
> bugged me for years about the arguments surrounding disability and 
> voting technology are 1) the claim that all people with disabilities 
> should be able to cast a secret ballot independently (without 
> additional human intervention) and 2) that somehow accommodating 
> people with disabilities using a different type of voting technology 
> from nominal voting operations is unacceptable as that singles them out.
>
> When we look at the universe of possible voter disabilities, it seems 
> reasonable to design voting technology that can accommodate "most" 
> voters with disabilities, but not all (multiple disabilities are just 
> too difficult to accommodate without assistance, often). There also 
> seems to be a disconnect--reminiscent of the problems with serious 
> security vulnerabilities showing up in voting systems in the field 
> after various rounds of testing and certification--in that certain 
> voting technologies designed to be accessible are, post-procurement, 
> deemed inaccessible to a certain slice of the disability community and 
> therefore inaccessible, period. I'm hopeful that the VVSG standards 
> for accessibility will evolve to better guarantee federallybcertified 
> voting systems are accessible, but without regular federal funding, 
> I'm not sure the market can support these costs. (While HAVA's 301 
> requirement that every polling place have an accessible voting system 
> is laudable in spirit, my experience is that they're not used much or 
> at all and when a voter with disabilities asks to use it, it's often 
> not set up and configured correctly... with horrific usability 
> properties for things like audio ballot navigation).
>
> So, how far does independent secret balloting for voters with 
> disabilities go?
>
> And accessibility is fundamentally a subset of the issues we deal with 
> in the usability/human factors area... requiring the voting technology 
> used by all voters to be the same may very well result in an inferior 
> voter experience (poor usability) for all voters, on balance.
>
> While effective disability voting is undeniably important, I worry 
> that it has started to shape voting over the past decade so much that 
> it isn't improving anything for anyone, when all is said and done, and 
> some are even resentful. (Pollworkers we talk to in our research 
> (qualitative, non-representative, not generalizable!) say things like, 
> "That machine is a $10k waste of money... no one has used it ever, in 
> the five years I've been a poll worker.")
>
> Anyway, I'll soon be starting a postdoc at NYU to work on health IT 
> policy (security and privacy), so I'm about to relegate most of my 
> voting work to consulting for the near future... I've found myself 
> having a number of "reflections" like this and I wanted to also thank 
> everyone out there in election-law land (Rick and the two Dans, 
> especially) that helped, encouraged or stimulated my thinking while 
> getting my PhD at Berkeley. Thanks, Joe
>
> On Tuesday, August 2, 2011, Daniel Tokaji <tokaji.1 at osu.edu 
> <mailto:tokaji.1 at osu.edu>> wrote:
> >
> > Waterstone on AAPD v. Harris <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=21246>
> >
> > Posted on August 2, 2011 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=21246> by 
> Dan Tokaji <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=5>
> >
> > The following is a guest post from Michael Waterstone 
> <http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/waterstone.html>:
> >
> > Thanks to Dan and Rick for inviting me to post on the recent opinion 
> in AAPD v. Harris 
> <http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200715004.reh.pdf>.  As Dan 
> notes <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=21187>, the wheels of justice 
> have moved slowly on this case.  The original district court opinion 
> (from 2004) is in an earlier edition of my disability law casebook 
> <http://west.thomson.com/blanck-hill-siegal-waterstones-disability-civil-rights-law-policy-cases/147894/40752995/productdetail>.  
> It held that voting machines requiring voters with visual impairments 
> to vote with third-party assistance violated Title II of the ADA.  The 
> Eleventh Circuit previously reversed the district court, holding that 
> plaintiffs did not have a private right of action to enforce the ADA.  
> This decision holds that voting machines are not a facility and 
> therefore are not covered by one of the regulations implementing Title 
> II of the ADA. ... Continue reading ? 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=21246>
>
>
> -- 
> Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
> UC Berkeley School of Information
> Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
> http://josephhall.org/
>
>
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> -- 
> David A. Holtzman, M.P.H., J.D.
> david at holtzmanlaw.com
>
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