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Hello and welcome to the Disability Law Lowdown. My name is Danny Warthling and I am one of your hosts for this ASL podcast.

Today’s podcast is about voting. The right to vote is very important.

There are two big laws that help people with disabilities be able to vote. One is the ADA – the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the other is HAVA -- the Help America Vote Act.

We hope you vote in every election, but about 20% fewer people with disabilities vote than people without disabilities. That’s why HAVA is important.

First, let’s talk about the ADA and what it has to do with voting. You might remember from an earlier podcast that Title II of the ADA covers the programs and services of state and local governments. So Title II covers elections and voting. And under Title II, polling places must be accessible to individuals with disabilities and the voting itself must also be accessible. But the ADA does not have a requirement that people be able to vote in private and without assistance. So the ADA does give us some rights in terms of voting accessibility, but HAVA goes a little further.

The idea for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) started after the 2000 presidential elections. Depending on your age, you probably remember that election because it took weeks to determine who won the election. There were well-known problems in Florida, but Florida wasn’t the only place that had voting problems. So after that election, Congress began to work on some of the issues and passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. Technically, HAVA covers only federal elections, but those are almost always combined with state and local electoral races. So, the HAVA protections tend to extend to all government elections.

HAVA helped create a big shift. Before, individual counties, parishes, cities, townships, or villages, each had voting responsibilities. Now, all voting responsibilities are shifted to one centralized state office. In most states, that is the Secretary of State.

HAVA was passed in 2002, but most of the requirements were not in effect until 2006. But since 2006, all voting systems must be accessible to people with disabilities, including the ability to vote privately and independently. That’s a change.

It is interesting to note that HAVA doesn’t actually say that every polling place has to be accessible or has to be in compliance with the ADA. HAVA just says that voting systems must be accessible. So after it was passed, but before it went into effect, the state of Mississippi asked the Voting Rights Section of the United States Department of Justice if it could be exempt from the requirement to provide accessible voting in every polling place. Mississippi said that it could not make all of the polling places comply with the ADA. The Department of Justice responded by saying that, even though HAVA did not specifically require each polling place to be fully accessible to people with disabilities, it did require that each polling place have an accessible voting system. So if you cannot get into the polling place to use the accessible voting system, then there wasn’t much point in even having an accessible voting system.

If you would like to find out more about HAVA, check out the PAVA organization. PAVA stands for Protection and Advocacy for Voting Access. These programs are funded by HAVA. To locate your local PAVA, you can call your regional ADA Center at 1.800.949.4232.

I hope you enjoyed watching this ASL video podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can subscribe for free through iTunes or by going to ASL.DisabilityLawLowdown.com

The Disability Law Lowdown is sponsored by a network of ten ADA Centers around the country. The ADA Centers provide training and technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability-related laws. You can call us at 1-800-949-4232.

The ADA Centers are supported by NIDRR.