Dear ACB members,
ACB, and your state affiliate, are eager to collect as much information as possible concerning your voting experience surrounding the 2020 General Election. This information includes more than just what happens on November 3, if you decide to vote in person that day. Rather, we want to know your entire experience from when you registered to vote to when you received an absentee ballot in the mail to when you went to the polling site. In other words, please share any voting-related facts with us. Because there are numerous steps, you are welcome to submit more than one declaration. Ideally, we hope that your experience is seamless and you can vote easily and accessibly. But unfortunately, we have heard many stories surrounding accessibility challenges for blind and visually impaired voters this year. As a result, we want to collect as many stories as we can to develop a kind of repository of declarations we can go to in the future when doing further advocacy work. These stories should be emailed to voting@acb.org.
When writing down such experiences, please include the following, if possible and if you are comfortable. If you do not want to include any of the following, please do not feel pressured to do so.
Please include:
- Your name
- Your city, state, and zip code
- The date(s) on which the incident occurred
- The name(s) of any Board of Election employees or poll workers involved in the problem
- A detailed summary of what took place
Examples of issues that would be helpful to learn about are the accessibility of the Board of Election's website for your county, i.e. were you able to register to vote and/or request an absentee ballot; the process of how your state and/or county administers absentee ballots and if such practices are partially or completely accessible or inaccessible; and the training and service of poll workers when you visit an in-person polling place with details about how they treated you when you asked to use an accessible voting machine. But again, these are merely examples. The voting process is accompanied with a myriad of steps so please elaborate on any and all of the steps you walked through to discuss how accessibility was, or was not, handled. Again, please email these stories to voting@acb.org.