Way off poll position

When it comes to voting, even the keenest of disabled people are heavily discouraged from exercising their right to vote, says Peter White

Liz Ball is dead keen to vote; she’s a political animal, and wants to have her say. And, if you listen to the politicians and the pundits, she’s just the kind of young voter we’re afraid of losing to apathy or disgust, as fears grow that the percentage of those voting may fall below 60 this time.

And yet, and as usual, we’ll be making it as hard as possible for Liz to cast her vote. With the dual disabilities of blindness and deafness, Liz will get her Braille manifestos, if she gets them at all, well after everyone else (ironic, as she’s one of the few people who will probably bother to read them). If she wants to go to the polls (and she does) she’ll need an interpreter who knows the deaf-blind manual, something it can take more than three weeks to arrange (and how much prior notice do we get for an election?). The difficulties of getting to the polling-station will almost certainly lead Liz to opt for a postal vote, but even if she does that, she won’t be able to conduct her vote with the privacy everyone else will take for granted. She’s very unlikely to receive her polling information in an accessible form, and will therefore need the assistance of her interpreter to make her mark in the right place. Had she gone to cast her vote personally, she might well have encountered a polling-station pretty inaccessible to many other disabled people: in schools and church halls, up or down flights of steps, down country lanes, asked to vote in places where you couldn’t swing a cat, let alone turn a wheelchair, or which aren’t served by public transport.

The fact is that despite a swathe of campaigns, anti-discrimination legislation and local authority duties, it’s another of those areas of British life where we continue to worship at the shrine of antiquity, and that great British motto, “it’s how we’ve always done it”.

The plain fact is that it’s now much easier to cast your vote between several indistinguishable manufactured girl- or boy-bands on X Factor, than it is to exercise your democratic right to vote for the candidate most likely to improve your life. The idea that we might vote electronically from the comfort of our homes, rather than trek across a ploughed field on a wet Thursday evening, goes against all our puritanical principles!

One of the most common words used by leaders and candidates is “change”. Pull the other one!