Autism Vox

Democracy and Disability

by Kristina Chew, PhD on January 2nd, 2007

In A Different Way Of Thinking: How society approaches disability from the perspective of someone with autism, James Medhurst asks why “the widespread exclusion of disabled voters” has not received the same attention from the public as compared to coverage about the introduction of electronic voting in the recent midterm elections in the US and about the poorly-designed paper ballots used in the 2000 presidential election. Medhurst, who was officially diagnosed with autism after self-diagnosing himself with it in 1999 while studying psychology, writes about inequalities in the voting process in both the US and in the UK, where he lives:

…. another significant problem is the inaccessibility of the electoral process. The classic text of disability studies, ‘The Politics of Disablement’ by Mike Oliver, first published in 1990, had a cover depicting a man in a wheelchair, at the bottom of a flight of steps leading to a polling station.

Fifteen years later, a report by the charity Scope on the 2005 General Election found that 68 percent of polling stations remain inaccessible in some way. Blind people are affected as well as those with physical impairments, for there is a legal requirement to provide a tactile means of completing a ballot, and this was breached in 28 percent of cases. The alternative is for blind voters to ask officials to mark their selections for them, which undermines the secret ballot and creates a dangerous potential for fraud. There is nothing worse than a stranger expressing disapproval at your party allegiance.

Medhurst calls for greater use of technology to make voting more accessible for disabled persons. Like Simon Baron-Cohen as quoted in Edge.org about why he is optimistic about science in 2007, Medhurst emphasizes that the fact that the digital age and our technological society are greatly to the benefit of disabled persons. He closes his article by noting that “We mock the Athenians for calling their state democratic when women and slaves could not vote but it is not clear our own electoral process is any more worthy of the name”: It was hardly the majority of the population that could vote in ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, and, as Medhurst points out, our own electoral process has still a ways to go to be truly “democratic.”

Medhurst does not specifically to refer to how electronic voting and other technological innovations might assist those with autism, and I am curious to know what he thinks about this.

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POSTED IN: Classics, Disability Rights, Media, Politics