The question of how best to assist voters with disabilities is important, but often difficult to address because there is so little empirical data on how those voters experience the system. Fortunately, we are starting to see researchers trying to overcome that lack of information by using existing surveys that capture voting and disability information – though not always linked – in a such a way as to give us a fuller understanding of how those voters interact with the voting process.
The latest example is a paper by Penn’s Peter Miller and UC-Irvine’s Sierra Powell entitled “Overcoming Voting Obstacles: The Use of Convenience Voting by Voters With Disabilities” which will be published in an upcoming issue of American Politics Research.