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TODAY o October 9, 2000
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A 'sleeping giant' wakes up, and candidates notice
Saeed Ahmed - Staff
Sunday, October 9, 2000
ATLANTA -- For years, they have existed as an afterthought in the candidates' minds -- a voting bloc 35 million strong courted only in the most peripheral of ways by the major parties.
But this election year, leaders of the disabled community are undertaking an aggressive campaign to boost voter turnout and ensure that their concerns are addressed beyond mere campaign promises.
''We're the sleeping giant of American politics,'' said Jim Dickson, vice president of the National Organization on Disability, a non-partisan advocacy group that is leading a get-out-the-vote initiative called Vote! 2000. ''If we vote at the same rate as the rest of the population, we could add 5 million votes this year. And in a race that is this razor-thin, that could make all the difference.''
With more than 2 million disabled voters in each of four important battleground states -- Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan -- the candidates are taking note. Both the Republican and Democratic conventions featured disabled people in prominent roles, and both Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore are trying to appeal to the community with promises of more government aid for assistive technology, health care and job training.
Still obstacles remain, and critics say the presidential candidates don't really understand the concerns of the disabled.
Officially, the Census Bureau classifies 54 million Americans as having a disability, making them the largest minority group in the nation. The category includes not just wheelchair users, the blind and the hearing-impaired, but also those with ''invisible'' disabilities, such as epilepsy, diabetes, mental retardation, AIDS, cancer and heart disease.
A study by Rutgers University revealed that while fewer than half of all Americans vote, only one in five disabled voters make it to the polls. In 1996, fewer than 11 million of the 35 million voting-age disabled Americans cast ballots, post-election surveys showed.
Dickson said the problem lies primarily with agencies that provide services to the disabled. Federal law requires them to offer voter registration to clients, but a study by his organization showed that only 25 percent of the agencies were doing so.
''Most agencies just didn't know about the law and there was no one there to enforce it,'' he said. However, since the Vote! 2000 initiative got underway last October, 60 percent of services have complied, Dickson added. Beyond registration difficulties, a disabled person also faces obstacles at the polling place. The problem is particularly acute for the nation's 5 million visually-impaired, who must either bring a companion or go into the voting booth with a poll watcher.
''It's an uneasy feeling going behind the curtain with someone else,'' said Nancy Duncan, director of Georgia Americans with Disability Exchange, who is herself visually-impaired. ''Voting is supposed to be a secret process, and this kind of defeats the purpose.''
While one solution would be to equip poll booths with speech recorders or Braille manuals directing the blind to the machine levers, Rhode Island is the only state to have taken that step so far.
Kara Sinkule, a spokeswoman for the Georgia State Elections Division, said the state election code doesn't call for such provisions, but she added that her office is ''always open to making the voting process easier for all Georgians.''
But the biggest barrier for disabled voters is getting to the polls. According to the Federal Election Commission, 20,000 of the nation's 120,000 voting places don't meet accessibility guidelines. In many instances, the stations are set up in churches, which are exempt from accessibility requirements. In others, they lack handicapped parking spaces, a ground floor location, or wide doors.
Sen. Max Cleland (D.-Ga.), a Vietnam veteran who lost both legs and an arm in the war, says he can understand how poor access would deter a likely voter.
''Since elections only take place every so often, what you have are fire stations and schools serving as part-time polling places,'' Cleland said. ''When you take pot luck like that, it's very hard to make all the locations totally accessible to the public, and it can be very intimidating for disabled people to decide to try their luck and hope their own polling locations are able to accommodate them.''
Leaning Democratic
Despite the obstacles, the disabled are becoming more politically active than ever before. A Pew Research Center study this summer showed that while 48 percent of the disabled cited inaccessibility at the polls as a barrier to voting, 84 percent said they plan to vote in the general election.
That could be good news for Gore because disabled voters have traditionally leaned Democratic. A Harris poll released last month showed Gore with a 20-point lead over Bush among the group.
One reason for Gore's lead is economics. One-third of all disabled people make less than \\$15,000 a year. And 70 percent are unemployed, compared to 4 percent of the population as a whole. So the disabled have had to rely heavily on government-financed health care and other services -- programs generally supported by Democrats.
But Bush too has history on his side. When his father ran in 1988 with a pledge to sign into law the rights of the disabled, the community rewarded him with a significant shift in votes that may have helped him overtake Democrat Michael Dukakis. Two years later, President Bush defied pressure from business interests and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, guaranteeing the disabled access to public places and private businesses.
This year, Gov. Bush is promising to build on his father's legacy with a \\$1.1 billion ''New Freedom Initiative.'' He also vows not to cut existing services to the disabled and will ''vigorously enforce'' the ADA , said Steve Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianiapolis and one of Bush's leading advisers on disability issues. But many disabled people feel the ADA, whose constitutionality is being challenged at a Supreme Court hearing on Wednesday, will erode further under a Bush presidency. Last week, dozens of disabled protesters blocked entrances to the Republican Party's headquarters in Washington demanding that Bush sign a pledge supporting the Act.
While both parties try to woo disabled voters with ambitious proposals, critics in the disabled community say that neither Bush nor Gore are addressing their real concerns. They say that issues such as integrated education for disabled children, parity in insurance coverage for mental illnesses, work incentives, and funding for assisstive technology aren't a part of either candidates' policy initiatives.
''It shows in their platforms that they are absolutely clueless,'' said Charles Riley, editor in chief of WeMedia, a lifestyle magazine for the disabled, which is devoting its upcoming issue to a comparison of the candidates' positions. ''They see us as just needing health care as though we are wards of the state in need of baby-sitting.''
Riley said a good indicator for voters to tell which candidate will live up to his promises to the disabled community is by watching the campaigns to see if they use captioned ads, hold rallies in accessible places, have sign language interpreters and provide campaign literature in Braille.
''Unfortunately, so far there are real shortcomings -- almost to the extent that some disabled rights activists are thinking of suing the campaigns under the ADA for lack of access,'' Riley said.
Still, many disabled voters feel that while change is slow to come, just the candidates acknowledging their concerns is a victory.
''It may be a token recognition and they may just be throwing a couple of words in their speeches, but it's still a recognition of a constituency that's out there,'' said Mark Johnson, advocacy coordinator for the Shepherd Center, a specialty hospital in Atlanta. ''Will we make the kind of difference this year that we will in 10 years? No, but what was once a small number of voices making noise is slowly turning into a deafening roar.''
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