State to launch vote-by-mail method for visually impaired
Sheila Young was 58 the first time she was able to go to the polls and vote without her husband or sister peering over her shoulder to help.
“I stood there and cried,” said Young, a retired College Park educator who is nearly blind. Using technology that read the candidates and ballot measures to her through a headset, she was able to make selections on a touch screen. “Itwas such a privilege to know I was able to vote independently, and if I didn’t want to tell anybody who I voted for, I didn’t have to.”
That was 2012. It has taken eight more years, a global pandemic and an 11th-hour lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and every election supervisor in the state, but Young will finally have another option to vote independently this November — an “accessible” vote-by-mail ballot.
Orange County is one of only five counties statewide to roll out the Accessible Vote-By-Mail Pilot Project this election cycle as part of a settlement reached in late July between the state and the Florida Council of the Blind.
Along with Miami-Dade, Pinellas, Nassau and Volusia, Orange election officials and disability rights advocates are now racing to educate voters who might want to use the new platform, including people with visual impairment as well as those
with mobility issues that leave them unable to mark a ballot.
“All of us are in a rush mode to get this put into play,” said Orange County Supervisor of Elections Supervisor Bill Cowles, who is leading the statewide implementation effort.
“We’re working with all the disability groups we can think of just to get the word out.”
All counties will have to implement the technology by 2022, reaching as many as 800,000 blind and visually impaired adults throughout the state.
The effort uses a secure online portal — the same one employed by the U.S. military to help deployed troops vote — to send a digital ballot to voters who request it by the Oct. 24 deadline. Recipients can then mark the ballots on their own computers with software that either magnifies the text or reads it aloud to them. Some software also allows users to navigate the ballot purely through voice command — an essential tool for people with paralysis or otherwise unable to use a keyboard.
Because Florida law doesn’t permit voters to submit their completed ballots electronically, though, the accessible vote-by-mail ballot still has to be printed out and mailed back to the elections office — just like other vote-by-mail ballots. So Orange will still send out regular vote-by-mail ballots to such voters, in addition to the electronic one, to provide a postagepaid return envelope to use.
A tracking system will prevent anyone from voting twice, Cowles said, even if someone tries to mail in two ballots.
A bigger concern is that older visually impaired voters or those with underlying health problems— the ones especially vulnerable to COVID-19— won’t learn about the program in time. With barely a month to go before the election, only a handful of voters have signed up for accessible vote-by-mail so far.
“We’re concerned about voting problems in a good year, and now in COVID, we’re really worried that people with disabilities aren’t going to participate or that they’ll risk their health by doing so,” said Olivia Babis, a public policy analyst for Disability Rights Florida. “We’ve been working on this [vote-by-mail] issue for over a decade.”
People with disabilities, who account for as much as 25% of the nation’s adults, are already less likely than their peers without disabilities to vote. And a federal survey in 2016 found only 40% of polling places were fully accessible to people with various types of physical challenges— and thatwas an all-time high. Many lacked wheelchair ramps or had narrowed hallways and other obstacles, for instance, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
In Florida, pollingplace technology adopted in recent years is supposed to allow blind and visually impaired voters to mark their ballots on a special machine. But that technology, too, has come with hurdles.
“The first time I ever went, they [poll workers] had no clue how to turn the machine on,” said Young, the current president of the Florida Council of the Blind.
“They said, ‘Well, we can help you fill out your ballot.’”
Instead, Young told them to call Cowles’ office and get instructions on turning on the machine.
“Voting by secret ballot is essential to integrity of the electoral process,” said Richard Alleyne, public policy manager for Lighthouse Central Florida, which serves people who are visually impaired. “It allows voters to cast their ballot without fear or intimidation.”
In recent weeks, Lighthouse has been working to distribute the county’s vote-by-mail request forms to its clients and is holding online seminars to educate people on how to use the new system.
Unfortunately, said James Kracht, immediate past president of the Florida Council of the Blind and a former supervising lawyer with the Miami-Dade County Attorney’s Office, the state had years to act on the matter but only did so after being sued in May.
In 2002, following passage of the federal Help America Vote Act mandating that all citizens have the right to a private and independent vote, the Florida Legislature enacted a statute requiring the Department of State to develop and implement accessible vote-by-mail, as over 20 states now offer. But officials didn’t follow through with certifying such a voting system — a requirement before county supervisors of elections can use one.