During the 2024 August primary election, a Detroit man called the Election Protection Hotline to report an accessibility issue at a polling location. The man, who had a mobility disability, went to vote at a church in the city where he was met with a flight of stairs but no ramp. He was forced to get out of his wheelchair and climb the stairs on his hands and knees before he could cast his vote.
In addition to being dangerous and gross, it’s humiliating to have to crawl a flight of stairs to access the same rights as nondisabled people, especially in an environment where welcomeness is built into the fabric of the religion.
“The man could have seriously injured himself, but he really wanted to vote. He should have never had to do that,” said Dessa Cosma, executive director at Detroit Disability Power, a nonprofit that organizes to dismantle the challenges affecting disabled Detroiters.
During the 2022 election cycle, DDP and The Carter Center, the nonprofit founded by former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, audited 261 polling locations across 16 jurisdictions in Southeast Michigan to gauge their accessibility. What the groups found pointed to a systemic lack of accessibility for disabled Detroiters, particularly at churches and schools. Eighty-four percent of the audited locations were inaccessible, including the church reported to the hotline last year.
“Our goal really was to have a conversation with [election officials], let them know what the problems were, talk to them about how to fix those problems, and really kind of keep building that relationship,” said Cosma. The group shared its findings with the election officials responsible for the polling sites. A few of the officials were willing to hear out the nonprofits’ findings and recommendations, but some flat-out denied the efficacy of the data, implying the problem isn’t as dire as the report indicates.
Lower voter turnout
Research consistently finds that disabled people have a lower voter turnout, which the Election Assistance Commission attributes to difficulties at polling places. A 2022 survey by the EAC and Rutgers University showed a 20% difficulty rate for disabled people who voted in a polling place compared to 6% among those who voted via mail ballot.
“Why subject myself to this?” Douglas Kruse, co-director of the Rutgers Program for Disability Research, said about the mindset of the disabled people surveyed. Over the years, the disabled people Kruse spoke to indicated that accessibility is improving but remains a serious barrier.
“Getting inside the polling place can be an issue. Sometimes there’s steps, sometimes there’s heavy doors at the end of ramps that are difficult to manage,” Kruse, who uses a wheelchair, said.
Issues often don’t end once inside the polling place. Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs of Election Center, a national coalition of election officials, said that layout can make it difficult for people using mobility aids — like walkers, canes, or wheelchairs — to navigate the room. Nondisabled people are unlikely to realize if an accessible voting machine isn’t set up to accommodate privacy or if the sidewalk outside of a polling location doesn’t have a curb cut — a portion of the sidewalk lowered to meet the street and create a ramp.
Experiencing this type of disenfranchisement is not uncommon for disabled people, who tend to be forgotten during planning despite making up a significant portion of eligible voters. A recent report from Rutgers projected that 40.2 million disabled people, or about one-sixth of the electorate, would be eligible to participate in last year’s presidential election. A little over half of these eligible disabled voters were projected to experience some form of mobility impairment, meaning they would need the same type of accommodations that were withheld from the Detroit voter who called the hotline.
Though the Justice Department expects churches, which are normally excluded from complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act, to create 100% accessible environments for election day, many polling locations fall short. DDP’s report indicated that only 12% of churches were accessible even though they were the second widest-used location across the 16 audited jurisdictions. Nationally, churches make up 20% of the over 60,000 polling places in the U.S. If DDP’s audit results were similar to the rest of the nation, about 10,000 polling locations, while trying to help, fall short for disabled community members.
Churches are still good polling places
Still, Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager for the National Disability Rights Network, thinks it’s a net positive that churches are often so willing to step up to be polling places. She often hears from election officials strapped for locations willing to serve voluntarily.
“There often aren’t enough, and churches so often fill in that gap,” Bishop told Sojourners.
However, she does stress the need for churches to seek opportunities for improvement. Bishop, who is disabled, said she and other advocates “don’t expect you to know how to fix the problem on your own.”
“I think our expectation is just that you reach out. Talk to people with disabilities. Talk to disability organizations in the area,” she said. For example, the NDRN has an organization in every state, U.S. territory, and Washington, D.C.
Last November, Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church on New York City’s Upper East Side, once again welcomed voters to walk up its ramp and into the voting booth. Despite being built in the 1920s, the church doesn’t require walking up or down steps to enter the space, making it accessible to those using wheelchairs and walkers, or others with mobility challenges.
“It’s in the fabric of the formation of the church,” said Lucas Thorpe, director of adult education, outreach, and mission partnerships at Church of the Heavenly Rest.
Founded in the aftermath of the Civil War by veterans — a group that’s more likely to be affected by disabilities — the church has long existed as a site for reconciliation. For over a century, they have embodied the spirit of “all are welcome” in their building and their interactions with the surrounding community. Some of their parishioners have impaired vision, others have COVID-19-related disabilities. Hearing-impaired congregants can check out hearing aids to listen to the Sunday sermons. Polling is part of the church’s mission of inclusivity.
“Providing a space for people in the neighborhood to come in, it’s like a natural part of our DNA, our mission,” Thorpe said.
He recognizes that every church doesn’t have a pre-established robust network of resources. But he stresses that funds are not as important to creating an inclusive space as thinking about a church’s connections to their community.
U.S. voting rights expert Sarah Blahovec said there are typically two types of barriers to access: Those that are structural, and those that are the result of poor training.
From there, Whitney Quesenbery, co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, recommends churches start where they can. Solving one problem may not solve all of them, but solutions “build on each other,” she said. “You can do it progressively.”
Starting small could mean selecting volunteers to look out for congregants in need or reaching out to the disability rights organizations in the area to better understand areas for improvement.
Bishop believes inclusivity and accessibility should be foundations for all churches.
“Because that’s what churches do, right?” she said. “They welcome everyone. And part of welcoming everyone is making it accessible to everyone, so that people with disabilities know ‘I am welcome here, wanted here, I’m valued here,’ not just as a vote, but even as a person who’s maybe considering coming to services at that church.”
Editor’s note: This article was updated on Jan. 9, 2025, to correct that Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter were both founders of The Carter Center.
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