Disability Voting News: April 9, 2025
Welcome to the Accessible Voting Booth newsletter for April 9, 2025. After last week’s coverage of the SAVE Act which is currently being debated in the House, I’m back to sharing some state-level voting updates. Before we get started, I neglected to put a picture of my dog in last week’s newsletter while covering the undeniably distressing potential impact of the SAVE Act. Here’s Oliver visiting the tulips by the Netherlands Carillon this week:
Let’s get started.
How Voter Access Barriers Impacted Wisconsin Voters with Disabilities (via Votebeat)
Wisconsin held an important statewide election last Tuesday, electing Susan Crawford to the and holding onto a liberal majority in the state’s Supreme Court (despite Elon Musk’s attempts to sway the election with millions of dollars). For some voters with disabilities, the recent decision by an appeals court to not allow for electronic absentee voting in this election removed the opportunity for them to receive an accessible electronic ballot that they could mark electronically, print out, and return. Votebeat interviewed one voter, Jess, who is blind, about her experience voting early in person and her perspectives on electronic voting. They also interviewed Verified Voting about electronic voting, one of the organizations that has been a strong opponent of electronic return of ballots. Prior to being stopped by the appeals court, Wisconsin’s system would have allowed voters with disabilities to remotely read and mark their ballot, but not return it electronically. However, as Jess noted in the piece, many blind voters don’t own printers, which complicates their ability to print and return a ballot.
This piece highlighted the ongoing tension between voters with disabilities who see electronic voting, including fully electronic voting, as essential for voting absentee privately and independently, and election security advocates, who see electronic ballot return as too large of a security risk. In Wisconsin, the push for remote electronic voting for people with disabilities continues. While electronic voting was not available for this election due to the denial of a temporary injunction, the merits of Disability Rights Wisconsin and League of Women Voters’ case for electronic voting will be weighed in a circuit court, potentially allowing for use of electronic ballot delivery and marking in future elections.
Arkansas Senate Passes Legislation Restricting Assistance for Voters with Disabilities (via Voting Rights Lab)
On April 2nd, the Arkansas Senate passed a SB 479 restricting who may assist a disabled voter within the polling place. Currently, there is no state law restricting who may assist a voter, while federal law prohibits only a voter’s employer or their employer’s agent, or an office or agent of the voter’s union, from assisting voters with disabilities.
This new legislation would require an individual providing assistance to be at least 18 years old and provide ID as approved by the State Board of Election Commissioners, who would create a list of the approved forms of ID. The name of the assistor must match the name on their ID. This legislation has now moved to the House for consideration.
I have researched the rules in every state around assistance for voters with disabilities, and those rules vary widely. Many states have no additional requirements for who may assist voters, and several states prohibit candidates whose names are on the ballot (and in some cases, the family of those candidates). However, some states have more restrictive measures about who may assist voters in the polling place. For example, Louisiana requires a voter to inform the local election office before they go to vote that they will need assistance–unsurprising, as Louisiana has some of the worst restrictions around voter assistance and accommodations that I’ve seen. North Carolina only allows near relatives and legal guardians to assist voters. Beyond restricting voters’ options for receiving assistance, these rules are usually not well advertised, and so a voter usually will not know about these restrictions until they show up to vote. This can make it much more difficult for voters with disabilities to get the support they need to cast their ballot.
Obviously, I’m not a fan of Arkansas’s legislation, which is now being considered in the House. I believe that voters with disabilities should have the ultimate say over who gets to support them in the voting booth, and that should not be restricted by age or having a specific type of ID.
Texas Senate passes Documentary Proof of Citizenship Legislation (via Voting Rights Lab)
Unsurprisingly, on April 1, the Texas Senate passed SB 16, legislation that would create a documentary proof of citizenship requirement similar to Arizona’s current system. I wrote extensively about SB 16 in the March 19th issue of The Accessible Voting Booth, but to refresh your memory: SB 16 would require all voter registration applicants to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, limiting the acceptable documents to:
U.S. passport or passport card
Certified copy of a birth certificate issued by a U.S. state or territory, or the District of Columbia
U.S. citizenship papers
Identification issued by the agency of the United States responsible for citizenship and immigration
Certificate of report of birth or consular report of birth abroad issued by the U.S. Department of State
Unlike Arizona’s system, this requirement would apply not only to new registrations, but to all voters who did not submit DPOC when they registered to vote: all of Texas’s 18.6 million registered voters would be required to comply. If they don’t provide DPOC, they would only be allowed to vote for U.S. House and Senate candidates. They would not be allowed to vote for President, state legislators, local legislators, or state ballot measures–at least, that is what Texas intends. I’m not clear on whether Texas has the authority to restrict voters’ participation in Presidential races, as that is a federal election. In Arizona, which also relegates voters who don’t provide DPOC to voting a federal ballot, those voters are able to vote for President, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate. To me, this sounds like Texas trying to enact DPOC restrictions on federal elections, so I’m assuming that if SB 16 passes as it is currently written, the restrictions on voting for President will be challenged in court (along with the rest of the law, hopefully).
SB 16 also requires registrars to verify the citizenship status of voter registration applicants and all registered voters and create new felony offenses for registrars who do not comply. It is an all-around awful bill because for the millionth time I will say: noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and so the intent and impact of this legislation is to disenfranchise voters who cannot comply with the DPOC requirement, with the greatest impacts on married women and trans people who have changed their name, rural voters, and poor voters who cannot afford to obtain documents.
If you live in Texas, you can take action by calling or emailing your legislator and asking them to oppose this legislation.
California Legislation Targets Universal Vote by Mail and Remote Accessible Voting (via Voting Rights Lab)
Apparently some California legislators want to follow in Utah’s footsteps and get rid of universal vote by mail. SB 335 would repeal the law that requires all voters to automatically be sent a mail ballot for every election. It would create a permanent mail voting list which voters would have to apply to join and would be removed if they fail to return a mail ballot in four consecutive statewide elections. This bill would also repeal requirements around ballot drop box availability.
Additionally, this bill would aim to repeal the provision that allows voters with disabilities, military, and overseas voters to utilize a certified remote accessible vote by mail system. Currently, these voters are allowed to request an electronic ballot, download it, read and mark it electronically using assistive devices, print the ballot, and return it to the county elections office. As I have mentioned before, this is an important accommodation to make vote by mail accessible to print-disabled voters who cannot independently read and mark a ballot, as they can use their assistive technology to do so.
The intent of this bill is to make it more difficult for voters to vote by mail in a state that primarily conducts mail-based voting. I’m not a Californian, but I would imagine this legislation is not going to be popular, and I hope it will be unsuccessful.
Colorado Senate Passes Voting Rights Act (via Voting Rights Lab)
Let’s switch to some good news: on March 31, Colorado’s Senate passed S1, which would establish the Colorado Voting Rights Act. This bill would take action to protect voters from experiencing discrimination in the voting process. It would prohibit political subdivisions from adopting policies that suppress the votes of protected class voters; create mechanisms for individuals, organizations, and the Attorney General to file lawsuits alleging voter suppression; and establish standards for evaluating claims of voter suppression and vote dilution.
Additionally, this bill includes provisions that expand disability and language access. Facilities serving people with disabilities would be required to publish voter information notices 30 days before statewide general and primary elections that includes information on voting rights, accessibility, and drop box locations. As I mentioned above, it can sometimes be challenging to find information on voting accessibility, such as information on who can assist voters, how to register to vote by mail, and how to request an electronic absentee ballot. This requirement would make that information more readily available. Furthermore, this bill would require municipalities with over 3,000 residents to create and publish sample ballots in minority languages, provide in-person locations for voting a ballot in a minority language, and notify voters of language access options. This is a great piece of legislation, and it has now moved on to the House for consideration.
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of The Accessible Voting Booth! I’ll be back next week with more updates. As always, if you’d like to support the newsletter and my work, here’s how:
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