INTRO TEXT
Everything these days is regulation, regulation, regulation, penalty, fine, threats.” That’s Medfield town administrator Mike Sullivan’s take on the Help America Vote Act, which is requiring municipalities to make all their polling places accessible to people with disabilities as of next year.
Sullivan, who has been Medfield’s administrator for 30 years, says it’s not the idea that the disabled need to be accommodated at the polls that bothers him. “We’ve always been very focused on the handicapped,” he says, and he praises the state’s disabilities office as “very helpful” in evaluating access concerns at Medfield’s lone polling site, the Ralph Wheelock School. But he bristles at the imposition of yet another “mandate,” which he calls “just one more little thing that the federal and state governments keep dropping on cities and towns.”
By January 1, 2006, under a provision of the four-year-old federal election reform law, all polling places must provide people with disabilities the same access and independence that other voters expect. Among other requirements, this means that every polling station must have at least one “touch screen” voting machine or similarly accessible system.
Often located in decades-old municipal buildings, schools, and churches, polling stations continue to present obstacles to voters with disabilities despite an array of federal and state regulations. An estimated 1.5 million Massachusetts residents have disabilities, according to the Massachusetts Office on Disability (MOD), and many municipalities have lagged in ensuring accessibility for this group of voters.
A 2004 MOD study found that most of the state’s 1,488 polling stations were effectively off limits to people with disabilities. Only 67 of the state’s 351 cities and towns had fully accessible polling locations. Sixty percent of sites had at least one feature that did not conform to state regulations. At slightly more than half of them, parking spaces designated as accessible still had problems such as a lack of “access aisles” or appropriate signs; and 29 percent of the sites had ramps that lacked handrails or had excessively steep slopes.
Local officials are currently being notified about deficiencies that must be corrected before a municipality’s first scheduled 2006 election, according to Brian McNiff, spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin. In some cases, McNiff says, these deficiencies should have already been corrected to bring public buildings into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
That landmark civil rights legislation, now 15 years old, contains a broad range of mandates, such as equal access to public facilities and reasonable modifications for voters with physical or mental disabilities. Massachusetts regulations are even more stringent, according to MOD director Myra Berloff. For example, the state prohibits “curbside voting”—that is, voting from a car or on the sidewalk—even though federal law permits it.
Stan Eichner, director of litigation for the Disability Law Center, a legal advocacy group with offices in Boston and Northampton, says that most cities and towns want to do the right thing. On Election Day last year, shortly after the MOD polling place accessibility study was released, the DLC and nine of the state’s 11 Independent Living Centers, which provide services for the disabled, conducted site surveys to determine how officials had responded to the state’s findings. Visiting 22 polling places in 13 municipalities, surveyors discovered that two-thirds of identified problems had been corrected.
Federal directives also have a way of capturing the attention of local officials. The city of Springfield has been under scrutiny for access issues since March 2002, when the US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the city alleging that a task force created in 1998 to “investigate and review” ADA accessibility standards had failed to act. Last February, the city settled the lawsuit, agreeing to upgrade physical access to polling places and other city facilities, as well as tackle other issues in voting, employment, law enforcement, and emergency preparedness.
After evaluating five bids from voting machine vendors, and reviewing tests of different machines during this fall’s municipal elections, the state will purchase and deliver new accessible machines to towns and cities, one for each precinct, later this year. Municipalities will have to pick up the regular maintenance tab, according to the Secretary of State’s Elections Division.
In Medfield, the lone polling station needs “very minor” modifications to a ramp and parking spaces, according to Sullivan, but he’s still irked by the ongoing costs his town will have to bear for the maintenance and re-programming of accessible voting machines. Eichner, in turn, has little sympathy for pleas of hardship from local officials.
“The truth is that [providing accessibility] is the cost of doing business,” says Eichner. “Cities and towns have had democracy on the cheap, because not to include [accessibility] as a cost of running your business means that the rights of people with disability came at a discount.”
Dartmouth is one town that has few worries about new regulations, having completed renovation of its eight polling stations “years ago,” says town clerk Eleanor White. When the MOD evaluated Dartmouth’s polling locations in 2003, the surveyor told White that, of the towns he’d visited up to that point, Dartmouth was “the only town that was up to par,” says White.
For MOD director Berloff, removing polling place barriers is an important step for getting people with disabilities to exercise their rights. “If you build it, folks will come,” she says.
