Our Work
The Right to Be Involved in Politics
What Self-Advocates Should Know
People with intellectual disabilities face many barriers to participating in politics. But self-advocacy organizations and their allies are increasingly finding ways to overcome those barriers.
Persons with intellectual disabilities face many barriers to participating in politics. On October 4th, the HPOD organized a panel featuring disability rights advocates working to help overcome these barriers in the United States, including in key battleground states. Participants from across the country shared important insights about how self-advocates and their allies are working to protect their right to be involved in politics.
For example, the Georgia Advocacy Office works to educate voters with disabilities and make sure they know their rights. They work together with self-advocacy organizations like People First of Georgia. The GAO also makes sure to reach people with disabilities in segregated settings and congregate settings, including institutions, sheltered workshops, and nursing facilities. In addition to educating voters, the GAO works to monitor voting places. They make sure, for example, that voting machines work, so that persons with disabilities have the support they need to cast their ballots in person. They work with the National Disability Rights Network and like-minded organizations in other states to make policymakers aware of the barriers that voters with disabilities face. Last, the GAO has gone to court to protect the rights of voters with disabilities. In 2021, they joined a broader lawsuit challenging voter suppression measures contained in Georgia's S.B. 202. This law limits the number of ballot dropboxes and the hours when voters can access them, which especially affects voters with disabilities.
Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE) also works hard to educate voters with disabilities about their rights. They provide trainings for self-advocates around the country as part of its GoVoter Project. They have developed easy-to-read toolkits on voting that self-advocate leaders can use to train people in their communities. Like the GAO, SABE monitors the experiences of voters with disabilities. Since 2012, SABE has surveyed voters with disabilities about their voting experiences and has reported their findings in plain language. These reports are very important because they identify the biggest barriers that voters with intellectual disabilities face. For example, SABE's survey of voters in the 2020 election found that the most common reason persons with ID did not vote was because they were told by others they could not. This happened to 32 percent of respondents with Down syndrome, 22 percent of respondents with ID, and 11 percent of respondents with autism.
These advocacy efforts and challenges in the United States mirror conditions across the globe. HPOD's Chair, William P. Alford; Executive Director, Michael Ashley Stein; and Director of Advocacy Initiatives, Hezzy Smith recently partnered with Special Olympics International's Global Center for Inclusion in Education to produce a policy brief, along with an easy read version, that captures the evolving dynamics affecting the right to political participation of persons with intellectual disabilities. The brief highlights a number of ways in which self-advocates are working to overcome the barriers that people with intellectual disabilities face, including by running for office themselves. Hopefully, examples such as Gavin Harding of the United Kingdom, Sashi Babu Paudel of Nepal, and Bryan Russell Mujica of Peru will inspire more self-advocates to seek political office.
Self-advocates and their allies have also sought to enforce their right to political participation through the courts, with mixed results. For example, disability rights attorney and HPOD affiliate Janos Fiala-Butora represented Hungarians with intellectual disabilities in a proceeding before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Committee's 2013 decision in Bujdosó and five others v. Hungary clarified that any voting restriction either resulting from a guardianship order or premised on an incapacity determination is discriminatory. However, more recently, in both Caamaño Valle v. Spain and also Strøbye & Rosenlind v. Denmark, the European Court of Human Rights declined to interpret regional human rights standards in a manner consistent with the Committee's interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Instead, the Court decided that the voting restrictions imposed on the applicants with ID were permissible because they were not merely a byproduct of the applicants’ guardianship orders. Rather, the voting restrictions were specifically mentioned in the guardianship orders based on judicial findings that the applicants lacked capacity to understand aspects of the voting process.
Thus, at the same time that legal protections like the CRPD have emerged to strengthen advocates' efforts to protect the right of persons with intellectual disabilities to participate in politics, significant challenges remain. These challenges only underscore the need for continued vigilance and advocacy by self-advocates and their allies to ensure they can enjoy and exercise their fundamental right to vote on an equal basis with others.
