NYT:

Laura Halvorson was ready to vote. On Thursday afternoon, she sat in front of a ballot screen at the Igo Library in San Antonio, after spending a month preparing for this moment. It was the first time in years that she had been in a public place, other than a doctor’s office.

Sitting in her wheelchair, she wore two masks — one a KN95, the other a part of her breathing machine. Because Ms. Halvorson, 38, has muscular dystrophy, a condition that progressively decreases muscle mass, and makes her more vulnerable to Covid-19, she needed to use a remote-control device supplied by poll workers to make her ballot selections.

No one knew how it worked.

The glitch was one of many obstacles she had to navigate, both on that day and over the previous weeks, to fulfill what she saw as her civic duty. For Ms. Halvorson and others with disabilities, casting a ballot can always present a challenge. But new voting restrictions enacted in several states over the past two years have made it even harder.

A law signed last year by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has made it more difficult for voters to cast ballots by mail and narrowed their options for voting in person, according to groups that advocate for people with disabilities and voting rights. Other Republican-led state legislatures, including in Georgia and Florida, have passed similar measures as a part of what they say are efforts to prevent voter fraud, despite rare occurrences of the crime.

“Instead of embracing the more accessible forms of voting that sparked record turnout, including among voters with disabilities,” said Brian Dimmick, a senior staff attorney for the disability rights program of the American Civil Liberties Union, “states have doubled down on new and more restrictive voter-suppression laws.”

None of the new laws single out those with disabilities, but advocates say they have left many people who would otherwise vote by mail with burdensome options: face the greater risk that their mail-in ballot could be thrown out — as Texas did at a higher-than-usual rate during the March primary — or go to the polls in person, which involves its own set of inconveniences or, worse, physical barriers, and often deprives people with disabilities of a sense of privacy and independence that other voters can take for granted.

Courthouse News Service reports.

USA Today reports.

NYT:

The Texas legislation, which Democrats blocked but Republicans plan to revive in a special session, is one of a series of Republican voting bills that would disproportionately affect people with disabilities. The Wisconsin Senate approved three last week with more to come, though unlike in Texas, the governor there is a Democrat and is expected to veto them. Georgia and Florida have enacted similar measures.

For years, advocates have worked to mobilize Americans with disabilities — more than 38 million of whom are eligible to vote, according to researchers at Rutgers University — into a voting bloc powerful enough to demand that politicians address their needs. Now, after an election in which mail-in voting helped them turn out in large numbers, the restrictive proposals are simultaneously threatening their rights and testing their nascent political influence.

“It’s only been the last few years that there have been studies done showing that if candidates would appeal to issues that the disability community cares about, there is such a thing as the disability vote,” said Bob Kafka, an organizer with Rev Up Texas, which aims to increase turnout among disabled Texans. “That’s why you’re seeing it playing out in Georgia and here and other places where the disability community is part of the larger fight against voter suppression.”

The fight also underscores the degree to which disability rights, once championed both by Democrats like former Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa and Republicans like former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, have become one more partisan football, even though there are millions of disabled voters in both parties.

The most recent version of the Texas bill would ban drive-through voting, further limit absentee voting in a state that already has strict eligibility rules, and let poll watchers record video of voters as purported evidence of wrongdoing. Disability rights advocates worry that partisan poll watchers will misinterpret legal accommodations — like a worker helping a disabled voter complete a ballot, or a blind voter using a screen reader — as fraud.

Valley News:

When Dee Milliken took her 19-year-old son to vote in November, she hoped the experience would strengthen his ties to the community.
Justin Milliken, who has cerebral palsy and a seizure condition and uses a wheelchair, is nonverbal and largely communicates through grunts and facial expressions. But his mother assumed that with a little help, he could participate in elections.

More than six months later, she’s no longer sure that’s the case.
Poll workers last fall made the process difficult, Dee Milliken said, and have questioned whether Justin Milliken was mentally capable of casting a ballot. Then last Friday, she received a call from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office from an official investigating whether she committed voter fraud seven months ago by helping her son fill out the ballot, she said.

Blog post at the Center for American Progress.

Houston Chronicle:

The U.S. Department of Justice will monitor Harris County elections, at county expense, for up to four years under the settlement of a federal lawsuit over inadequate access to polling places for voters with disabilities.

New GAO report.