Accessible voting

I’m planning a workshop on voting for the young people I work with. When I went to vote for the first time, I had no idea what the process would be like. I’d never been able to get my hands on a tactile voting device and was unsure how exactly it should be applied to the ballot paper. I remember being surprised by small things, like how thin the slot is in the ballot box. It makes complete sense why this is the case, but it was a small unexpected thing that I had never considered.

Disabled people have specific voting rights, but who is going to tell you about them? Also, for a lot of the young people I work with, there is a real need to be prepared to face an unfamiliar situation. I don’t want anxiety to put someone off voting, if having the opportunity to experience it in a relaxed environment could have helped them feel confident.

I’m trying to make the workshop really interactive, and it will include a demonstration of the McGonagle Reader. This is a combined audiotactile voting device, and I personally think it’s going to make a massive difference once it’s widely available. The current system isn’t working, but the McGonagle reader solves a lot of the issues blind voters are facing. But if you’ve never been able to try it, and don’t know if it will help you, are you going to pester the elections team at the council to get one? Probably not. This is why I feel it’s important to show disabled voters the kinds of adjustments they could request.

We’ll do a little bit of talking about the rights blind voters have, how elections work, and reasonable adjustments. Then the rest of the workshop will be practical. I hope this makes it engaging! It is so hard to plan events. I always try my best but I do worry that nobody will be interested.

Anyway, I won’t be running the workshop until October but I really hope people will attend. I know voting can feel like a bit of a boring and abstract concept. It can feel like it’s pointless. But it’s so important that we engage and do make our views heard.