**ASGuy **has posted an extremely empathetic and reasonable view of accommodating disabled Americans during an election.
Voting is a right. The ADA is federal law. Obviously, you have been *extremely *inconvenienced by doing your job. I’d tell you to imagine how inconvenienced disabled people feel on a daily basis, but you clearly lack the ability to see all sides.
May I suggest that you do NOT involve yourself in working at a polling station in the future? You are clearly unwilling to do the job you signed up for.
Right and it’s probably unfair to extrapolate from one location to all locations, the number of disabled voters in Florida for example may be a great deal more than the number in Colorado.
Have accommodations for disabled people.
Even if none show up. Some might show up.
It might be that nobody disabled would show up, but if only one disabled person shows up - that one person is not less important than any more-abled people.
Ableism is still a huge problem, as demonstrated by ASGuy. Society needs to do much better in accommodating disabled people, and we need to fight against ableism.
Given that the county now apparently has the sentence “I thought the ADA was supposed to help disabled folks mainstream into society, not become an elite part of it” in a public record, waiting to be discovered in some future legal action related to disability access, I’d hope that they were already moving to make this happen on their end!
Premise: A grown-ass adult shouldn’t be told “get somebody to help you” just because said adult is disabled.
Premise2: Disabled people should not be told to stay out of public spaces (“vote by mail”) because it’s inconvenient to the rest of us to have to deal with them.
Premise3: Other grown-ass adults forced to make accommodations for the disabled should do so with good grace, because one day sickness or old age will render them disabled. I never realized how inaccessible public transit was until I broke my foot. Getting on and off buses was no problem, but getting to and from bus stops was a bitch and a half. I considered myself fairly aware of disability-rights issues, but I didn’t really get mobility impairment until I lived it.
ASGuy, good on you for volunteering. Bad on you for being a total ass on this topic.
We as a society are only as good as we treat the most disadvantaged among us.
Be thankful that you, no one in your family, and no one in your acquaintance are handicapped. It’s obvious you don’t personally know any handicapped folks or you wouldn’t have shot your foot off there. And, as Lord Feldon rightfully pointed out above, you also helped any lawsuit that might come against your county. Nice work big buddy.
As much as I think ASGuy is being kind of an ass about this topic… it comes on the heels of my hearing about this ADA compliance issue (which looks to be from last October, not sure why I’m hearing about it this week).
$78,000,000 to be spent making 1 subway station accessible via elevator, multiplied 70 times. I think somewhere below 78 million the idea of reasonable accommodation is surpassed by the costs society must bear.
A few bucks to make an election station compliant? Yeah, we need to spend that.
I’ve had conversations with people at work- a college- where they’ve got all angry about the gubmint insisting on the ‘waste’ of making the internal IT system accessible, because ‘We don’t even have any employees that need it!’ like the problem was that the college kept hiring disabled people who could only sit there, unable to use the computer.
Some people just aren’t very good at thinking these things through.
Hey! Change the name and the tale is told about you.
I’ve always been very independent and didn’t need help from anyone. Until I snapped off a wrist bone and ended up with one good hand. I need handicapped bathroom stalls and door openers.
I agree that costs must be considered - but you also have to consider savings. There’s some number of people who are using paratransit services (which cost about $70 per trip in the most recent numbers I found, $35 if the trip is handled by a taxi or car service) ) solely because the train station near their home or destination doesn’t have an elevator *. If the elevators eliminate even 1 million of the 7 million or so paratransit rides per year, they will pay for themselves quickly.
Some people are only eligible when their trip requires an inaccessible train station. A wheelchair user who can ride an accessible bus might only be eligible if the trip requires a using a train station without an elevator and of course, there are people who don’t use wheelchairs but can’t climb a couple of flights of stairs.
This is what I posted in ASGuy’s thread. It’s what I would say to him here as well —
It seems you must have a broad perspective of the money, time, and effort expended to accommodate disabled voters. Please set forth an accounting of such, as well as the overall impact to disabled voters in your community. You clearly wouldn’t have come to these conclusions without a thorough analysis of these facts and data.
It seems to me that in order to reach your conclusions, you would have answered this to your satisfaction, by researching the difficulties faced by disabled voters and how types of machines, voting booths, signage, location, and parking affect those disabilities.
I’m also interested in your detailed view on the elite status of the elite. What societal, financial, or other advantages are they enjoying as a result of this elite status?
Oh, wait. You sent your letter to the department and board without doing this research?
I would be interested in your analysis of how mainstreaming can be accomplished in the absence of accommodations.
At a price of $70 per trip, it would take 78 years to pay back the cost of this elevator investment. It’s $78M per station for 70 stations, $5.5B in total.
I mean, I dig the idea of making services available to the disabled, I really do. But this plan costs $5.5B and it only puts elevators in 70 of the 350 stations that don’t have them.
Whoops- forgot that $78 million was for one elevator, so maybe not that quickly. Or maybe it will be quick -although I couldn’t find an estimate of how many rides were due to the lack of stairs at the train station, I did find a NYT article that said the majority of rides were taken by wheelchair users. Either way, , the savings on paratransit rides must be considered as well as the cost of the elevators.
