Voting accessibility for disabled person. It concluded with a question and answer session with the commissioners. This is an hour and a half. Good afternoon, everyone. I want to thank you all for coming back to the exciting panel of accessibility. Im tom hicks, vice chair of the electrics commission. And on my left you will see a panel, and to my left is coming, and the other left is also coming. So i will introduce you to folks who are here. Virginia so, im going to introduce the folks who are here [ laughter ] so, to my left, virginia atkinson is the senior accessibility and accessible inclusion specialist at the National Foundation for Electoral Systems, and she has more than a decade of experience work on disability rights and governance issues. And she provides Technical Assistance and training to Civil Society, organization and election management bodies. She is also the lead author of the manual equal access, how the include persons with disabilities in elections and political processes. On my right, stafford ward. He is secretary of the board of the oversees Vote Foundation as well as the technology in Voting Systems adviser. The foundation provides u. S. Citizens with the Voting Services and election data central to the commissions on this side, over here. Yep. In elections, we just roll with it. So, central to that mission is the foundations work to provide online tools to assist the americans living anywhere in the world. Including those living abroad and serving in the military to register to vote and request their absentee ballots. Stafford plays a lead role in shaping the strategies of the Technology Initiatives and works to ensure that the voters have easy access to information they need to participate in the democracy from all corners of the world. Michelle bishop is the Voting Rights specialist with the National DisabilityRights Network and a position she has held for nearly five years. Michelle provides training and Technical Assistance providing Voting Rights and accessible for voters with disabilities and she also coordinates the working group and manages their list serve. Last but not least and i will introduce him, because he is on the way is cameron siznak and he is the director of the office of electi elections and general registry in Fairfax County, the largest county in virginia, which the states most populous county. And he oversees the staff to coordinate the voting elections and initiatives for the county, and 3 4 million voters and during his time as commissioner, he has expanded the countys Language Access and the successful story that he shared with us last summer at our language summit here in d. C. , and we are looking forward to his continued conversation when he arrives today. So with that, i want to start with michelle to talk about disability access. Absolutely. Am i good . Okay. Hi. Im Michelle Bishop and i like to make an entrance and so i am always fashionably late, but i would like to thank cameron for being later than i am today. Come on up. [ laughter ] something that i will be basically never living down from commissioner hicks, so thank you for having me this afternoon first and foremost, and im happy to be here to talk about disability voter access and what we are looking towards in the 2018 election cycle and with the disability Rights Network, we are a National Network of disability rights organizations, so there is an organization of ours in every state, district, and territory in the United States. Wherever we are there and we are mandated by haba to access voting for people with disabilities. And now that is out of the way, i want to get to what you have come here to hear. And to sum it up for access to voting for people with disabilities is the report coming out of the government Disabilities Office and they have surveyed the polling place access in 2000, and 2008 and 2016 and that has been the best benchmark has to where we are at, and this is the most recent report of 2016 is really telling, because what we have found is that the polling place, itself, that have to travel from the parking all of the way up to the voting booth has consistently improved in terms of the accessibility. The first time it was studied in 2000, only 16 , and less than 20 of the polling places were full less than 20 of the polling places were accessible. And in 2008, 30 and then 2016, 40 , and that is sounding bad because less than half is accessible, but the sad thing is that when we saw that, i was excited. That is telling you where our expectations were right now, because it is less than half, but at least the number is going in the right direction and i will take that win for right now. I will say that the although progress has been slow for many reasons. The least of which is lack of funding. The progress has been slow, and we are moving in the right direction. I think to me the number more telling is that since 2008, gao has been looking at the accessibility of the voting booth, itself. The actual station. And in 2008 they found that 46 of them were not fully accessible. 46 of voting stations themselves had some type of the impediment for people with disabilities. In 2016, that number went up. 65 were in some way inaccessible. We are going in the wrong direction when it comes to how we are actually casting the ballots. This means that they were less likely to be wheelchair accessible, less likely to be sheltered to show privacy and less readily for headphones for people who cannot read a page or screen, and interestingly enough, less likely to even be powered on. We are setting up Voting Machines that we are not bothering to switch on. And there are two i think that in my mind are main reasons for, that and what changed between 2008 and 2016 . I will say that the first thing that we have talked a lot about today is the funding issue, and when hava passed the federal government was willing to put the money into the states to get the equipment that we need to make it happen, and that money has not been replaced in. In states and local jurisdictions that desperately need the funding to be able to maintain or update that equipment. And it is sorely needed to be updated, because the machines that we are using were invented before iphones and ipads and so they are severely out of date, but the funding is not there to make the changes. So we are working with equipment that is less than ideal. Another major thing that is a focal point today is the security issue. I think that it is important, and i think that it is important for elections to be secure and accurate and we all know that, but the main solution for the security issue is returning to the hand marked paper ballot. This has been the primary solution that has been offered for all of our Cyber Security concerns which means that we went back to polling places where mostly setting up folding tablets and a stack of ballots and a pen. And we have one piece of accessible equipment and you cant do that and we are not even able to, because for some reason when we talk about voting security, we get comfortable with the segregation. And to look at this paperback, and anyone else can go to use a special machine over here in the corner that is [ inaudible ] can and how we are casting the ballot to start to see the inequality. There is one that you can see that separate is not equal. And so we are seeing the decline in the accessibility of the voting booth itself and we will continue to see that until we start to proposing Real Solutions that are secure and accessible and fund them with the research to make that possible. Because that technology did not exist when we first went through this 15 years ago and we were having the same argument, but that technology exists today, and we need to nknow how to leverage it today to be efficient and affordable for the election authorities. So there are real solution, but we are not talk about them and not working together to find them. And also in 2018, we are changing the way we vote. All of the sudden, people are registering to vote online or maybe a mail ballot. Voters expect those options, and it is easier for the Elections Officials to manage, and the voters to manage the options, but all of the options have to be accessible. They are in varying degree, and like everything else, everybody does it differently. And the extent to which we are talking about disabilities throughout that process to make sure it is accessible is going to determine how accessible the systems are. Are we talking to people with disabilities when we roll it out or creating new voting equipment and asking the people with disabilities after what they think about it. Are we purchasing new systems and implementing them and then ask the people with disabilities how great they are, rather than will it work in the first place. So it is that we have to be collaborating and working together. We talked about today the expectations of the elections authorities, right . It is not enough to be an expert in elections, but now you have to understand the queuing theory and how to shorten the lines and be a security expert and then blockchain came up, and nobody defined it. So i bet you that half of the people in the room dont know what blockchain is, and so you have to know what that is and that is unfair. Because it is faulty logic that you dont need to be an expert in all of those thing, and there are disability organizations in every state and territory federally mandated to work on this whether we are talking to them or not, so we may as well be working together. And we can solve a lot of the issues and that is what we are looking at coming into 018. Thank you. We appreciate that. And one question later son how can groups like yours work with the Election Officials to move the ball forward and with that, cameron, we are going to be going to you, and the premise is that we are giving fiveminute presentation, and then we will be, i will be asking questions. Considering the target audience i will try to limit my five minutes, and so i have to thank you for allow knowing be the award winner for the fashionably late entry. Being the moderator is great, and i will tell you that literally being trapped on the on ramp on i66, and if you are visiting d. C. In the future, avoid 66, because if you are talking about the lines for elections, we can build some fantastic lines off there. In terms of the local administration for elections, i could not agree with more of what you said in regards to looking holistically in the approach for the approach. Here in virginia, one of the things that we had a fantastic look at election where is we had to have recount, and you could see these things not in the simulated environment, or the test environment, but the real world, and did the person fill out the bubble right. For those who have done the recounts in the election, and those of you who have done the audits and looked at all of the ballots, you know it is not as simple as filling in the bubble and that directions that they follow. So, you know, i get to think that, you know, what happens when somebody who may not with be able to hold a pen correctly, and what happens with the person who does not have the ability to actually understand fill in the bubble, what options do they have somethey that will ting too over to ask for the one machine that might be there. A few years back i was offended when i walked into the polling places, and my teams had put up a handicapped sign on the ada device and started to explain to them it is not for somebody who is physically disabled necessarily, but it is for somebody who might have a visual disability or for somebody who might have a cognitive disability to allow them to interact and that is the approach that we try to take here in Fairfax County is that making our election officers understand that the way it needs to be and not necessarily rolling up in a wheelchair or who might be using canes. So getting that idea into the 5,000 election officers heads at the same time they do in fact need to do more than pull it out of the bag, and turn it on, and they need to understand that it needs to have all of the accessories able and ready to go so that every voter will have the ability to vote. And so one of the things that i want to look towards is leveling the voting experience for everybody. So as the new equipment is coming out and more reminiscent of the dre style that presents over votes and ensures that voters with language barriers have that opportunity no matter the language, and getting and using those ada devices as actual full polling devices for everybody so that regardless of what the voters disabilities or limitations may be, they are voting the exact same way and in the exact same method as every voter who cast a ballot and ultimately at the end of the day ends up with the exact same types of ballots so we are not sitting here debating back and forth and having a threejudge panel to decide if an extra tlie that someone drew through the name is who the voter wanted or not. So those are the paths that we can go down towards. But those are decisions to be made as a administrator, and aim the one pounding the drum at the General Assembly, we need more money, or we are going to be seeing situations like this. If we dont have the tools and the are resources for the voters, we will continue to have es s essentially what is contested elections, because we will have ink all over the paper ballots, and so i think that minimizing that, and getting those resources, and one of the things they look at local cannily especially as of just a little bit ago are General Assembly here, here, and in virginia, and just begin. Thank you for invite knowing the panel and a specific acknowledgment to my wife, happy anniversary. I have a slightly different take on the disability, and different from what the other panelists have said today. The goals for my presentation today is a different of the narrative of the absentee voting and overseas voting. What do i mean by that . Gone are the days of ballot issues prior to the uniform and overseas voting and absentee voting since august of 1996 where the ballots were difficulty to reach to voters overseas, and received on time, and the citizens had the ability to vote overseas, and the u. S. Voting foundation cease itself in a Inflection Point as far as the policy for voting overseas in terms of accessibility. And those voters who have lived overseas for 20plus years have to file the absentee ballot every year, and tax limitations on that status of living overseas and they have that hurdle to overcome, and the states with american citizens born overseas may not have the ability to vote from overseas. If you are looking at the overall overseas voting turnout rate, it is 4 . I think that my colleague here at the federal Voting Assistance progr program wrote a report to congress in 2016, it is a 4 rate, and just this morning doug chapman mentioned the u. S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments with houston versus randolph ips tut institute military voters, and four years in afghanistan and he was thrown off the rolls in 2011 simply because he didnt elect consecutive election cycles and thats why he was taken off the rules. This is part of the narrative that is changing and that we are focused on in the u. S. Vote foundation. So i have to get through three points that i want to identify in my remarks here. I want to explain who is the u. S. Vote foundation and i want to address more about accessibility and technology that were utilizing and three to talk about the participation that we have with elected officials around the country. I know tom mentioned that was part of the overseas foundation. We are known as the u. S. Vote foundation. In 2004 we were known as the overseas Vote Foundation that was established by our president and ceo swingot. At the time she saw a need for having greater access for those living overseas consistent with the act. So were not an advocacy group. Were a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization that serves u. S. Citizens living domestically and abroad to access the ballot and to register to vote. As part of the same year in 2004 we were the first to have the writein absentee ballot and part of the cobb act. We were there to make sure that these elements were in place so that u. S. Citizens living overseas no matter where they lived had access to the ballot. This is part of our mission and vision that every citizen is a voter and what that means is basically ensuring that every citizen has access to voter information as part of their engagement with democracy and civic life as voting is the central action. So the foundation usees and deploys Civic Technology to make the voting process easier for u. S. Voters and election ministers across the country. So how do we go about doing that . With accessibility, the cobb act came with the military and overseas Voter Empowerment act of 2009. That helped to facilitate and expand the rights of voter rights overseas with u. S. Citizens and thats labeled the foundationdation to leverage that passage of the act so we can increase accessibility for those u. S. Citizens living overseas and this is are the pa of the narrative that were changing to discard notions of what it meant to overseas to what it is now and in terms of how you use Civic Technology to dress accessibility issues overseas. We use industry standards. You know, in terms of technology and there was a notation and xml, and python languages and some of the things that are out there to develop our back end databases so that theyre available to our state officials and local officials and Third Party Organizations. Some of the services that we do provide to harness in accessibilities that we develop custom websites and h