Monday, March 14, 2005

Voting Inaccessibility in Missouri

See this article, which begins:

Nearly a quarter of Missouri’s polling places were inaccessible to disabled voters, according to a survey conducted for the secretary of state’s office.

Of the polling places that were accessible, nearly half had at least one significant barrier to voting for the disabled, according to an analysis of the survey results by The Associated Press.

The results illustrate the obstacles disabled Missourians face when heading to the polls, said Kelly Anthony, director of the Missouri Disability Vote Project, led by Paraquad Center for Independent Living in St. Louis.

"We’ve got some hard, indisputable numbers on how inaccessible polling places are for people with disabilities, and this is something we’ve known as a community forever, but we’ve only known about it anecdotally," Anthony said.

Some of the "hard numbers":

An analysis of the results by the Missouri Disability Vote Project found that 20 of Missouri’s 114 counties have no polling places that are highly accessible. They also discovered that rural areas tended to have a higher number of inaccessible polling places.

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