No winners in access survey

Paul Carter

Accessibility to voting for disabled people failed to show any significant improvement at the last general election, with over two thirds of polling stations still inaccessible, according to the findings of a survey by a disability charity.

The Polls Apart campaign, conducted by Scope, which publishes Disability Now, used a survey to gather the experiences of disabled voters at almost 1,000 polling stations across the UK, and found that 67 per cent included one or more barriers to voting.

The survey asked respondents to rate the accessibility of their polling station based on 17 questions covering areas including physical access, accessibility of information, attitudes of staff and the ability of disabled people to vote in secret or with assistance.

The figure marks an increase of just one per cent in the number of polling stations that were found to be accessible at the 2006 general election, suggesting that progress towards improving access to the electoral process for disabled people has significantly stalled.

The charity said that examples of access problems reported in the survey results included wheelchair-users who had to vote in the open air because there was no ramp provided in the polling station, along with voters who encountered negative attitudes from polling station staff.

Many local authorities were also still using sites for polling stations that were inaccessible to wheelchair-users, such as temporary cabins or caravans in fields.

The most common access barrier encountered was the failure to provide either a tactile voting device or a large print version of the ballot paper, both of which are legal requirements under the Representation of the People Act 2000.

Scope is now calling for the introduction of online voting to improve access to what it calls the "overstretched and inflexible" system currently in place.

More than a third of disabled people (35 per cent) interviewed for Scope's report said they would prefer voting online, while postal voting was listed as the least popular option.

Ruth Scott, Scope's Director of Policy and Campaigns, said: "Britain's archaic voting system is stretched to breaking point. It has been failing disabled voters for some time and, as we saw during the last General Election with
scores of people queuing outside polling stations, it isn't working for other voters either.

"Nothing has changed to significantly improve access at polling stations and for postal voting over the last decade. There is a pressing need for clearer accountability over how elections are run, to help improve the accessibility of current voting methods, as well as expanding these to include new options.

Unless this happens disabled people will continue to struggle to exercise their right to vote.

"In a digital age where people can vote by text for the X-Factor or bank online, they should have the choice to vote over the internet."