Assisting the vote? Disability as a cost of voting

Abstract

Tens of millions of voting-eligible Americans live with disabilities, many of whom need a form of assistance when casting ballots. Drawing on publicly available administrative data from five recent general elections in Florida (2014–2022), we offer a portrait of individuals who have attested when registering to vote that they need assistance when voting. Then, leveraging turnout data as well as vote-by-mail (VBM) requests and returned ballot data from our five elections, we model turnout and the likelihood of having a rejected VBM ballot as a function of the need for voting assistance, among other voter-level factors. We find that the rate of registered voters needing assistance has remained steady in Florida at roughly three percent, that older and racial/ethnic minority voters are more likely to attest that they need assistance to vote, and that, all things equal, voters needing assistance not only have a lower overall turnout rate but also are slightly more likely to have their VBM ballots rejected than registered voters who do not indicate they need assistance to vote.