Funny that I sat down to blog on Election Day and didn’t have much to say. After having written my fingers off earlier about my own voting problems. That was to have been the big day for accessible voting. New York city finally complying with the Help America to Vote Act (HAVA) requirements on accessible voting. Well, I was already pessimistic.

The standard method of voting for those of us who cannot read the print ballots has been to have two election workers help us vote – one from each of the parties. Which implies there are only two parties. The implication is that with a Democrat and a Republican standing there, neither one can get away with messing with our votes. I guess. It isn’t secret and certainly isn’t neutral.

I’ve done my best throughout the years to give myself that secret ballot. At the point where I could still see the ballot if I could get my face an inch or so away from it, I would bring a chair into the booths with me to stand on and contort my body around to get my face that inch away from everything I needed to read. In California where I ran into the hole punch cards with the famous hanging chads I probably ruined a voting book bending it so I could work out where to punch my own holes. In between there was Minneapolis where I lived three years and had no choices, – the ballots were marked with special pens on paper ballots I just couldn’t read at all. There I had to fight for the right not to vote out loud in the middle of a crowded room. All there were counters with privacy dividers and I dragged my two poll workers, usually rather old women, all over the building looking for a room where we could go in and at least I’d only have to share my vote with the two of them. In one election I found the room only to have a group of partying people enter halfway through my voting.

That was the time that I decided not to vote at all if I couldn’t have a secret ballot. I had been having a love affair with the Minnesota caucus system and had gotten myself made alternate to the Democratic convention. And I cast my vote realizing that it wasn’t the Democratic pole worker I felt was protecting my vote – I felt like I couldn’t vote the way I usually did – finding a third party I liked something about for any position where either there was a shoo-in candidate or nobody else I particularly liked. Because I would be publicly disloyal to the party I professed to represent.

Back in New York City with good old fashioned levers, I worked out a system where I’d make up a list of where everything was supposed to be on the ballot, have anyone go into the booth with me just to make sure i had the layout correct, and then send them out and vote counting levers and spaces. It takes a long time that way, and I am usually in the booth with poll workers outside calling in “are you OK, dear?” every minute or so, causing me to lose count and have to start again in tricky places. But it worked and I did it.

I think that the implication of this sort of thing is really negative beyond the inconvenience or even frustration. Because there is so much stock set on the importance of secret ballots. and if it’s so important then what does it mean to be constantly reminded you are not one of the people it’s important for. that is part of the growing anger I’ve been feeling about what it means to be blind in America. It means saying “we” all the while excluding yourself and having others say “us” all the time excluding you. It means that everyone assumes you will be saying “except me” in your head and not be bothered by it. “of course you can’t expect us to do everything different just for you?” It means hearing this creeping language of specialness – once used specifically to describe accommodations in education, then applied to the kids getting those accommodations and now to disabled adults. We are now “the special people.” If our needs were so darn special people wouldn’t have to go to court to force them to be met.

Sometime last year I went to a demonstration of what I thought were going to be the accessible voting machines. I went already knowing that “accessible to all” wasn’t true – that among others, deaf-blind people who need braille were going to be ignored. Asmall enough group, not worth worrying about. Not that anyone said that in so many words, but “Oh, they’ll just get someone to help them” I was told by someone in a major blindness organization who was working on the accessible voting issue. . Where they were going to get that someone wasn’t clear – they were under the assumption that deaf-blind people are entitled to something like the interveners deaf-blind people in Canada use – people who can act as guides and interpreters. But they are not. And that person slid away without answering my next question – why it should be important for blind people to have secret ballots if the principle still didn’t include everyone. If anything, it is easier for a hearing-blind person to “get someone” to read a ballot and mark it for them than it is for a deaf-blind person. When I mentioned the problem to a so-called cross-disability group where people were working on HAVA, I was told that just because a technology didn’t exist yet (meaning braille displays) shouldn’t prevent access for the rest of us. Well, first of all, there are developing countries where blind people vote by use of plain cheap technologically unsophisticated and non-polluting hard copy braille. The kind produced by pushing a metal stylus through sheets of paper. But even on the technology front, there have been refreshable braille computer displays since computers were first accessed through terminals and long before the development of the speech output that is so much more commonly used today by the majority of blind people. The thing is, they are expensive. and perhaps people were afraid that one more expense would shut the project down altogether. I just don’t know.

But I am not deaf. I have a minor hearing impairment. I don’t pretend it is nothing, but if I can carry on a conversation with another person in a very noisy room and hear everything they say, well, that is about where it is. I may lean a little closer, turn my better left ear towards the speaker, but I can hear them. I do, however have more problems with lower pitches, the opposite of the more common pattern. I had one student in a class whose voice was pitched right in my most problematic area and I just couldn’t’ tell what he was saying to me. I felt badly about that one. I also have ADHD and perhaps that is the reason I can’t listen to very slow speech and do anything useful with it. If it is too slow I can’t keep track of what was said before and string the words together in my mind. the New York city Metro Card machines have speech that is set in that very low range at a very slow non-adjustable rate and the last time I tried to use them was the time I wasted $38 on a special weekly bus pass instead of the monthly card I wanted to buy.

So, the last time I went to a voting machine demo, I sat down, put on my headset, and was greeted by a voice very much like the Metro Card voice. Too deep and too slow for me to process in any useful way. I was told there were adjustments that could be made but only after the ballot is fed into the machine and so these features couldn’t be part of the demo. I had other concerns, like why they were using synthesized speech instead of the more human quality of digitize speech so common today. I personally don’t like digitized speech so much, but there are many who do have problems with synthesized speech, among them large numbers of newly visually impaired seniors who may also have hearing impairments.

I did go in today expecting that awful low slow speech and was pleasantly surprised that the machine did use digitized speech. The only problem was that, on this machine that was supposed to also have been for hearing impaired people, the highest volume setting was too quiet for me to fully get the instructions. The poll worker who was helping me with this was a lovely woman but the process was next to useless. Fortunately, I stopped before we even fed the ballot in and I was able to go back to my original booth area and vote the tedious but workable way I have for the past 6-8 years with the help of that very lovely poll worker who spent considerable time helping me copy out the ballot. That was just too bad. Maybe next time.