DETROIT — When Kenia Flores goes to the polls, she listens to her ballot choices with headphones and uses an accessible machine to cast her ballot.
This device allows Flores, a blind voter, an alternative to hand-marking a paper ballot. When working and properly maintained, these voter-assist terminals can help Michigan voters with hearing, visual or other disabilities participate in elections.
Despite federal laws regulating how polls must accommodate voters, a recent audit of 261 polling places in Metro Detroit found that voter-assist terminals were often not plugged in, missing headphones, showing error codes, or placed in ways that did not guarantee privacy. The greatest barrier to voting at these locations: a lack of accessible entrances. This included a lack of clearly marked entrances, buildings with stairs but no ramps, or ramps blocked by parked cars or signs. The most widespread issue was not having a fully set up wheelchair accessible voting booth. Only 16 percent of polling places in Metro Detroit were fully accessible, or had no impediments to voting, the audit found.
A Detroit Disability Power canvasser registers an elderly resident to vote while knocking doors in Detroit’s Core City Neighborhood. Oct. 11, 2022. Photo courtesy of Rami Alvarez/Detroit Disability Power
Based on her experiences with barriers at the polls, Flores was not surprised by these findings.
“We want to be able to vote like everybody else,” said Flores, a voting access and election protection fellow at Detroit Disability Power (DDP), which conducted the audit with the support of The Carter Center. “We can’t do that if there are physical barriers that prevent us from doing so.”
State lawmakers are now considering a package of election bills that seek to protect and expand access to voting for Michiganders, including the state’s Black voters and voters of color, 1.3 million voting-age residents with a disability and voters with limited English language proficiency.
This latest slate of election bills are part of Michigan Democrats’ efforts to establish a state Voting Rights Act and further safeguard elections in a swing state that President Joe Biden won by a small margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2020.
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Some of the protections in the proposed legislation focus on prohibiting voter denial, dilution, and suppression in part by establishing a preclearance requirement that would force jurisdictions to prove that changes will not discriminate against voters of color, creating a public database of election and demographic data, lowering the threshold for languages eligible for ballot translation, and creating a system for curbside voting and allowing transportation assistance for voters with disabilities and voters over 65.
Democrats have a majority in the state Senate and took a narrow majority in the House after the 2022 elections, one they hope to keep in an April 16 special election. When the Michigan VRA last year was introduced last year, they cited a “relentless assault” on federal voting protections in the past decade. Republicans in Michigan and in other state legislatures have sought to restrict voting in recent years.
Michigan Senate Republicans proposed a 39-bill package in 2021 that would have limited use of ballot drop boxes for absentee ballots until the day before an election, prohibited mass-mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters, stopped vote counting by noon the day after the election, and prohibited providing prepaid postage for absentee ballot return. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed the few bills that passed both houses.
Michigan Sen. Darrin Camilleri on the Senate floor. Photo courtesy of Sen. Darrin Camilleri
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, Democratic state Sen. Darrin Camilleri said he thought about other policy areas that could be affected by the high court. Voting was among them.
“Given ongoing attacks on democracy and voting rights from elements of the Republican Party,” Camilleri said, “we needed to enshrine voting rights in state statute.”
Camilleri, who co-sponsored the latest Senate bills, worked closely with the secretary of state’s office to craft the bills, collectively known as the Michigan Voting Rights Act (VRA). They are currently in committee.
Protecting the right to vote
The Michigan VRA both reproduces and expands upon the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which has been increasingly weakened over the past decade.
The 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder dismantled Section 5, a key provision of the landmark civil rights law that required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to submit proposed changes in how they hold elections to the Department of Justice for approval. While many affected jurisdictions were in the South, two townships in Michigan were also covered by this requirement, but no longer had to submit changes for preclearance as a result of the ruling.
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Since Shelby County v. Holder and other cases the high court has taken on that have continued to challenge parts of the 1965 law, the gap in voter participation between white and nonwhite voters has been increasing nationwide, according to a Brennan Center study.
Nationally, the gap reached more than 18 points in 2022, meaning that 14 million more ballots from voters of color would have been cast if they voted at the same rate as white voters, the center said.
The racial turnout gap grew more quickly in places that were previously covered by Section 5, the report found.
In Michigan, which was partially covered by the preclearance requirement, the weighted turnout gap was 3.6 percent in the 2020 presidential election. That figure grew to 4.3 percent in the 2022 midterms.
Federal standards provide “the floor,” said Dessa Cosma, executive director of Detroit Disability Power, adding that states can provide more protections, more rights and more access on top of that baseline.
The Michigan VRA would add to those federal protections, she said.
“That’s important because at the federal level, the VRA has been weakened over the years, and we don’t want that to happen in Michigan,” Cosma said. “If we can codify those rights in our state constitution, even if it gets weakened at the federal level, we are still protected here in Michigan.”
Voters Not Politicians Education Fund host voter access town hall with local Grand Rapids leaders to provide community with opportunity to hear about new voting laws and engage with various local leaders on voter engagement and ballot access December 6, 2023. Photo courtesy of Voters Not Politicians
In the last few years, Michigan has become a national leader in election policy, said Kim Murphy-Kovalick, program manager of the pro-democracy group Voters Not Politicians. Voter-led efforts in Michigan have helped end partisan gerrymandering, expanded voter registration, and mandate a minimum number of secure drop boxes in early voting for all statewide and general elections, she said.
At the same time, Michigan is a large state with a decentralized election administration, with about 1,600 county, state, and township clerks across the state.
“There can still be a lot of variation in how clerks enforce these policies,” Murphy-Kovalick added. “The Michigan VRA will help voters by making it easier to know what policies are in place for their local election and by giving voters a path for recourse if those policies aren’t followed.”
For instance, Camilleri said a right-wing activist in the Metro Detroit suburb of Waterford Township convinced the local clerk to quietly remove more than 1,000 people from the rolls. After The New York Times reported the incident, Michigan’s secretary of state Jocelyn Benson instructed the clerk to reinstate the improperly removed voters and issued a letter to all the state’s clerks about the proper process for voter registration challenges.
Camilleri said one of the Michigan VRA bills “would have prevented the scenario in Waterford by requiring clerks to provide advance notice on any effort that would remove electors from voting rolls.”
A much-needed language accommodation
Part of the Michigan VRA would also increase the number of jurisdictions required to translate ballots and election information into languages other than English.
It is an accommodation that would “greatly benefit communities with high numbers of non-English speaking voters,” Murphy-Kovalick said.
Michigan is home to the nation’s second largest population of Arab Americans and those with origins in the Middle East or North Africa (MENA). Only four jurisdictions are required by federal law to provide translated ballots — three into Spanish and one into Bangla. Arabic, Assyrian, and other languages spoken in the MENA region are not covered by the federal Voting Rights Act. Two cities — Dearborn and Hamtramck — offer Arabic ballots, a requirement passed by city council resolutions.
National Network for Arab American Communities (NNAAC) advocating for a MENA category during their annual Arab American Advocacy Days in Washington, D.C., in June. Photo courtesy of National Network for Arab American Communities
“Arab Americans and, more broadly, MENA communities are not protected by federal legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” said Sara A. Ismail, Public Policy Associate at National Network for Arab American Communities. If Arabic were a protected language, Ismail said that there are enough Arabic speakers to meet the language access threshold of 10,000 voting-eligible people with limited English proficiency or 5 percent of a geographical area.
If Arabic were covered by the federal VRA, “this would mean our communities should have in-language materials and ballots in Arabic,” Ismail said. Right now, the only places that offer Arabic ballots are Dearborn and Hamtramck in Michigan and Cook County, Illinois, she said.
The Michigan VRA would lower the language access threshold for translated ballots from 10,000 to 600 voting-eligible individuals who have limited English proficiency, or 100 voting-eligible people with limited English proficiency who also comprise at least 2.5 percent of the voting-eligible population in a geographical area. The Michigan VRA would also allow any language that meets the threshold to be translated, not just the languages specified in the federal VRA.
“This was done by the secretary of state to keep in mind any other communities that might immigrate to Michigan years down the line,” Ismail said.
READ MORE: Michigan lawmakers are considering a state-level MENA category. Here’s what that would mean
Two House bills, separate from the Michigan VRA, would collect state-level racial data on individuals with origins in the Middle East or North Africa, which would help determine the size of the communities. The bills, co-sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Alabas Farhat of Dearborn, have been referred to committee. The federal Office of Management and Budget has just revised federal standards of data collection to create a racial category for people with origins in the MENA region.
“Right now, our data on MENA individuals is only trackable in Michigan based on language reporting within the census and American Community Survey,” Camilleri said. “We’ve been able to work around that in our bills by defining language minority groups as a protected class.”
Improving that data “will strengthen the functionality of our bills and ensure that we’re properly identifying our population,” he added.
For voters with disabilities, options and flexibility are key
Voters with disabilities have to navigate the world differently, said Cosma of Detroit Disability Power.
“Having more time and having more choices of how to vote is really critical,” she said, adding that research shows that those with disabilities vote 6 percent less than their non-disabled peers, accounting for about 2 million fewer ballots cast. That is because of barriers at the polls, like not being able to get to a polling location on a particular Tuesday or not being able to hand-mark an absentee ballot independently because one is blind, she said.
“Those kinds of things really add up,” Cosma added.
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While many of the barriers DDP found are low cost and easy to remedy, “there are also barriers that are less easy to fix, like a building that only has stairs and no elevator or ramp, or a building whose doorways are too narrow for a wheelchair,” Cosma said. “In the meantime, people still need to be able to exercise their right to vote in person, which means they might need to pull up their car and have election workers bring a ballot out to them.”
Curbside voting is an accommodation in the Michigan VRA that would not only help voters with disabilities, but also those 65 years and older. There are also provisions in the proposed legislation that would allow voters with disabilities who have repeatedly had their voting rights violated to have a court-appointed monitor assigned to that voting jurisdiction.
State enforcement of these issues means “if there is a breach, somebody doesn’t have to go to the federal level to fight it, which makes it a lot more accessible for the average person to actually stand up for their rights,” Cosma said.
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“While disabled voters have specific barriers,” Cosma said. “We’re part of every other voting group that there is, which also means we can face barriers, not because of our disability, but because of other factors of who we are, where we live, or what kind of environment we’re in.”
It is very important for the community, she added, to not only focus on disability voting rights, but “really to be great advocates for voting rights for all people.”
“All people will become disabled as they age,” Cosma said. “We really have all the incentive in the world to get this right, and it’s totally doable. It’s not a pipe dream.”
