Why the Disability Vote Matters
There is an excitement in the air for people with disabilities. This is our year. This is our election year. It will be our election year if we take it for our own.
Last month the President began his final chapter at the State of the Union. It was apparent people with disabilities owe much to the past several years. We celebrated the Affordable Care Act and protection from discrimination based on pre-existing health conditions; the executive order to increase disability employment; Section 503; the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment and Assistant Act regulations; the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act; establishment of the [Federal Emergency Management Agency] Office of Disability Integration and Coordination; the 25th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA); and recognizing intersectionality of diverse groups through the White House’s Champions of Change programs. This progress is a testament to our national community power through advocacy.
And yet while the President called out to communities across the nation, we did not hear the word “disability” echo in the House of Representatives chamber. Although we can track progress in our favor, we still encounter barriers to recognition and access. These barriers are evident through ongoing struggles to maintain International Association for Healthcare Security and Safety program sustainability; confusing building construction standards that seem to decrease access, legislative attempts to chip away at the ADA; fast evolving election policy and systems that leave voters with disabilities behind; an education system that continues to segregate students with disabilities and limits their access to accommodations delaying graduations and the collegiate experience; public transportation systems operating around the ADA; and a lack of funding for independent living, inequality in employment opportunities, and too many more examples to mention.
In this election year, we are reminded that there are 36 million eligible voters with disabilities in America. How often do you hear the word “disability” and our concerns discussed on the think tank chit chat sessions of the cable news stations? How often do we hear our elected officials speak to our needs unless we have invited them to an event? Are we being overlooked? Let’s take a look at some numbers.
According to Rutgers University School of Labor and Management and their study on voters with disabilities, we were the second largest minority voting bloc in the 2012 presidential election – African-American voters were 17.8 million, voters with disabilities 15.6 million, and 11.2 million were Latinos. Which of those groups do we see discussed as a voting bloc on the news? We don’t hear “disability,” do we? But in recent years we have been closing in on the voter turnout gap between voters with disabilities and voters without disabilities from 11% in 2008 to only 6% in 2012.
However if you apply our 2012 turnout to the number of eligible voters from our community only 40% of us voted.
We don’t need to operate at 100% to get the attention we deserve. If you remember from what I said, in 2012 we had a 6% gap between our turnout and that of voters without disabilities. That 6% translates roughly to about three million voters nationwide. When you think about it nationwide three million voters isn’t a lot. That 6% is another 60 people for every 1,000 voters. That is not a huge jump. If we each got another 60 people for every 1,000 voters in our towns all across this State and in different states across the nation, we could make up that three million.
What would an extra three million voters look like? Well, we would increase our turnout to 18.6 million voters with disabilities, making our community the largest minority voting bloc in America. And at that point the media and our elected officials could no longer deny the size of our electoral power.
The point of this discussion today is not to draw comparisons or competition between our allies. After all, people with disabilities are black and white, women and men and transgender, Latino and Asian, short and tall, gay and straight, people of faith and people of ideology. We are the ultimate melting pot and the infinite rainbow.
So how do we begin to make this leap? How do we power up for it? By learning from our allies, our older brothers and sisters in social justice and solidarity that came before us. We are learning from the successes of the Suffrage Movement, from the rise of the Union Domination through the Workers Rights Movement, the achievements of the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the accomplishments of the Marriage Equality Movement, and we must take a careful look at the common denominators in the quest for triumph.
Through careful examination, the unifying activity for each of these communities was activating individuals into collective and measureable voting blocks. These groups participated in Get Out The Vote campaigns (what we call “GOTV”) and demonstrated to elected officials the ability to affect election results. This effect didn’t happen overnight for these groups. It took decades of painstaking detail and connecting with voters one-on-one and in blocs, finding out what motivates them and using those messages to drive them out to vote.
Beginning in small cells around the nation, each election cycle was an opportunity to grow their capacity larger than the previous election until one day they captured the attention of candidates. Each of these groups can today approach the legislators from across the nation, courts and Congress to find a greater amount of success than our own community. In fact, although many of these groups are considered disability allies and partners, we have recently seen ourselves overshadowed sometimes by their goals and objectives. This is what we call “electoral power,” the ability to have a measured and visible effect on elections. This effect allows a community to be actors on the political stage with the elected officials who know that a group can deliver the votes that could determine their own futures in office. This power can be used to hold our officials accountable to the ballot box that elected them.
Communities who invest in building electoral power over time often find themselves on a Governor or President’s to-do list. How many of the groups that I talked about today have we seen on the to-do lists of recent presidents? The goal here is not to paint a picture of conflict with our partners, but rather to challenge ourselves to build the same type of power for the disability community, to stand with similar footing among fellows, and negotiate for fairness and access with equal strength. Electoral power does not mean that barriers will stop rising in our path but it does mean that we will always advocate from a stronger position to break those barriers and increase access.
Ted Jackson is a Get Out The Vote strategist and California Foundation for Independent Living Centers community organizing director. He rallied the Disability Day crowd to get out and vote to make lawmakers recognize the impact of the disability community in legislation.
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Eric E. Jacobson
Executive Director, GCDD
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