We launched a user-friendly website with accessible voting options in every state

Several years ago CCD spoke about early voting with a voter who had late-stage cancer. She liked the idea, especially because it meant she could vote on a day she felt well enough to make the trip to the vote center. But she didn’t know if early voting was an option in her state.

Another time, we were testing an accessible voting system with a participant who had limited use of her hands. She found the accessible controls built into the system hard to use. She told us she wished she’d known more about the voting system before arriving: if she had, she would have brought a mouth stick, an assistive technology she can use to easily navigate a touch-screen. 

These stories, and countless others like them, are a big reason why CCD takes plain language so seriously. To paraphrase plain language activist Sandra Fisher-Martins, wanting to understand my options to vote is not a whim, is not an intellectual curiosity. It is a necessity that I have in my daily life. And above all, it is a right, it is everyone’s right.

According to the Elections Assistance Commission, “voters with disabilities were still almost twice as likely as voters without disabilities to report difficulties.” From our own conversations with voters like the two mentioned above, a communications breakdown is at the heart of many of those difficulties.

Access to clear, timely information can make the difference between voters exercising their  right to vote or not participating in elections. 

In 2020, Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse found that, “If people with disabilities voted at the same rate as people without disabilities who have the same demographic characteristics, there would be about 1.75 million more voters.” We believe that one of the primary reasons for this gap is how hard it is to find easy to understand information about voting options for people with disabilities in many states. 

To close that gap, we partnered with the Microsoft Democracy Forward and Accessibility teams, and Coforma.io to create AccessibleVoting.net, a plain language guide to accessible voting options available in every state. It builds on our work in 2020 on HealthyVoting.org, but adds even more information specifically for voters with disabilities. We’re thrilled to launch the site just in time for REVup’s 2022 Disability Voting Rights Week. 

We included information about the voting systems available in each state for both voting in-person and by mail, and provided links to video walkthroughs of how to use each system. As we heard from the voter with limited mobility, having time to prepare in advance is vital. That extra preparation helps voters know what to expect, mark their ballot more easily, and make a plan to bring any additional personal tools so that they can vote privately and independently.

Our website presents each state’s information using the same layout and language. That consistency makes it easier for disability rights advocates to see the range of options available, and advocate for better options within their own state. It also means that national helplines that serve voters in multiple states have clear, up-to-date information in one place instead of having to hunt across 51 different websites, all of which organize their information differently. Eleven states don’t have a dedicated page for accessible voting options. That means they either don’t have any information available on their website, or that it’s buried on other pages and so takes a lot of time to find. 

With 10,000 local election offices around the country, we hope that state and local offices who want to provide more information to their voters with disabilities, but haven’t known where to start, will use AccessibleVoting.net as a model for what information to include on their own site. AccessibleVoting.net is a work in progress. We’d love to hear what you think about it. You can reach out to us at hello@civicdesign.org with any questions, comments or feedback.