January 27, 2006

"Disabled try out voting machines for accessibility"

"Jerry Daniels cast fake votes in a phony election Thursday and was delighted to have the chance.

"This is the first time I've used a voting machine in eight or 10 years, and it just feels great," said Daniels, a Santa Rosa man who's legally blind.

Daniels was joined by about two dozen other disabled voters as Sonoma County asked three voting-machine companies to demonstrate how their systems make it possible for people with physical and mental disabilities to cast ballots.

"This is a real exciting time," said Vaughn Held, who works with the disabled at the Community Resources for Independence in Santa Rosa.

"Someone who's blind or deaf or physically impaired just wants a level playing field. They want the same access to voting as an able-bodied person," said Held, who uses a wheelchair and has limited use of his arms.

Beginning in June, disabled voters in California will have that access. Under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, every polling place in the nation must have at least one accessible voting booth by this year.

California counties, which also face new state laws requiring all touch-screen voting machines to provide a way for voters to verify that their ballots have been tallied correctly, are scrambling to find and purchase the new voting machines for the June 6 primary.

"We're going to have to buy machines for 335 precincts," said Janice Atkinson, assistant registrar of voters in Sonoma County. "But before we do, our goal was to get as many people (with disabilities) here as possible."

The county wanted to watch how the machines worked with people with different types of disabilities: the blind, the deaf, the physically disabled and those with other impairments.

There wasn't any shortage of volunteers, said Held, who helped find people to test and evaluate the voting systems.

"I told them that they were going to have a chance to make a change in the community," he said. "Having the county listen and hear what we were talking about -- that was the exciting part."

Posted by Randy Riddle at January 27, 2006 09:06 AM