by John M. Williams
Since the 2004 Election on November 2, a debate in the disability community has focused on this question: Did more people with disabilities vote for President George W. Bush than for Senator John Kerry? If you ask different people you will get different answers.
Advocates for people with disabilities tell me the President’s support declined among their demographic. Among the scores of voters I spoke to since the election, all of them say they voted for John Kerry. Harry Thomas, 33, who is visually impaired and lives in New York City, said, “I can’t believe that Bush was elected. Every disabled person I know voted for John Kerry.”
Gerald Thomas, a Midwestern advocate, said, “Advocates for disabled people voted for Kerry because they knew they would be treated better under Kerry than Bush.”
Among nonadvocates for people with disabilities, however, the President’s support rose. Michael Calloway, Jon McGonagill, and Rebecca Wolf supported the President.
“I voted for the President because his economic policies benefit the average person,” says Calloway, a book editor for a St. Louis, Missouri publishing company. Calloway has dyslexia and was born with one foot shorter than the other. Calloway also supports the President’s policies on the war against terrorism.
Jon McGonagill, a Texas resident with paraplegia, added, “The President took the war to the enemy abroad.” A Texas resident and Republican, McGonagill is a Republican and works as a design engineer.
Rebecca Wolf, a lawyer from Mobile, Alabama said, “Bush was more convincing than Senator John Kerry on winning the war against terrorism.” Wolf, 39, has diabetes and is legally blind.
Wolf and McGonagill laud the President’s anti-abortion position. They oppose abortion because they fear people will abort a pregnancy if they learn the fetus has a disability. “Abortion is morally offensive and wrong,” says Wolf, who has two children.
A major spark of this debate was the release of a pre-election survey by Harris Interactive, showing likely voters with disabilities preferring Bush over Kerry by 52.5% to 46%. One percent of likely voters with disabilities preferred Ralph Nader. Released on November 9, 2004 the poll was conducted by telephone within the continental United States between October 29 and November 1, 2004, among a nationwide cross section of 1,509 likely voters, including 253 people with disabilities. Likely voters were defined as United States adults who are registered to vote and said they were “absolutely certain to vote,” and also included those who had already voted in this election. Figures for age, sex, race, education, number of adults, number of voice/telephone lines in the household, region, and size of place were weighted where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population.
While the margin of error is ± 2.5% that the poll accurately reflected the population of all likely voters, it is ± 6% that it accurately reflects likely voters with disabilities. That is an unusually high margin of error for any poll, which makes its reliability problematic.
“It’s a major break from past voting patterns in which the disability vote heavily favored Democratic Presidential candidates,” said National Organization on Disability President Alan Reich. According to Reich, there were clearly new dynamics at play this year. Reich attributes the shift in voting patterns for people with disabilities in this election in part to concerns over terrorism and national security- issues that were not factors in past elections.
In past presidential elections, people with disabilities have consistently supported Democrats over Republicans by solid majorities. According to Harris Interactive, in 2000, Vice President Al Gore was preferred 56% to 38% by likely voters over then- Governor George W. Bush. Bill Clinton carried the disability vote 69% to 23% over Senator Bob Dole in 1996, and 52% to 29% over President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
Between November 11 and December 3, 2004 in conversations with 24 people with disabilities, 22 Democrats and 2 Republicans, seven people told me they voted for President Bush, two people said they did not vote, and the remaining 15 said they voted for John Kerry. The Bush supporters said they believed Bush was a stronger war president.
The President’s support was solid in the so- called red states, but lacking in the blue. “The President has shown himself to be a strong leader in the war on terrorism,” said Billy Kline, a Democrat from Kansas City, Kansas who has cerebral palsy.
One of the contributing factors to the President pulling in voters with disabilities was the Republican control of both houses of Congress. Kline and McGonagill believe that if John Kerry were elected, the Republican-controlled Congress would never pass anything he proposed, especially in the homeland security area.
“The House and the Senate are too partisan. Party interests outweigh national security interests,” McGonagill said.
The partisanship issue, however, inflamed the President’s opponents and propelled them to vote against him. Chicago resident Stanley Thomas, 50, a retired railroad engineer, who went out on full disability a decade ago, says, “The poisoned, partisan atmosphere in Congress prevents Democrats and Republicans from working together. This is wrong, especially during this era of our war on terrorism.” A new Democrat, Thomas switched parties two years ago.
Disabled Political Scientist and San Francisco, California, resident, Mary Lu Wong says, “Washington, DC, cannot function effectively with partisanship so dominant. Except for tax cuts, nothing that benefits most of the people is being passed.” She blames the President and his party’s narrow monetary interests for the partisanship.
Many of the advocates I spoke to cited the President’s record as troublesome for people with disabilities. They believe his policies have increased the gaps between the rich and the poor, failed to provide health care for those who need it, failed to produce jobs, weakened civil rights laws, and loaded the federal bench with judges whose decisions have weakened some of the most far-reaching aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And so the controversy over whether more people with disabilities voted for George W. Bush than John Kerry continues. Is there an answer? James Dickson, vice president, governmental affairs, American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), says, “We may never know.” Dickson manages AAPD’s Disability Vote Project.
Most voters I spoke with said they had no problems casting their ballots, which could be a good sign for the efficacy of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which was intended, in part, to make voting accessible to people with disabilities. HAVA, which passed in 2002, is not scheduled to take full effect until the 2006 election; however, many states have tried to get a head start on the deadline to put new accessibility measures in place. According to a few of my sources, the system is not perfect yet, to say the least.
A lawyer with a speech disability in Washington, DC, told me that when he went to vote in Virginia and stuttered on his name, he was asked, “Do you need assistance voting? Are you intellectually able to vote?” He shrugged off their comments and voted.
An Iraqi War veteran told me that when he wheeled himself into the polling place he was told there was not a booth small enough to accommodate him. He demanded and received the accommodation, voted and left. He was proud of the right to vote, he said.
John M. Williams has been writing about assistive technology for 25 years. A sample of his book Assistive Technologies: Creating a Universe of Opportunities for People with Disabilities can be seen at www.atn-ctcf.org.
