From the Associated Press:

Nursing homes, notorious places for voter fraud, need greater guidance on how to help residents vote, senators and voter advocates say.

Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, said he and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., planned to ask the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to develop nationwide voting guidelines for state election officials and nursing home staffs.

… About one in five votes in the 2004 presidential election was cast by someone 65 or older. By 2040, it is anticipated about 40 percent of voters will be 65 or older. (more…)

From the Associated Press in Newsday, New York Times:

A federal judge is giving New York until Jan. 4 to develop a timeline for how it will comply with a federal election law to make voting more accurate and more accessible to the disabled.

U.S. District Court Judge Gary Sharpe spent much of a court hearing expressing his frustration with what he described as the state’s paralysis and failure to meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act while every other state took action. He reminded officials several times he could jail members of the state Board of Elections for contempt of court.

“Why is it that New York thinks it can thumb its nose at the federal government?” Sharpe asked. (more…)

From Newsday (AP):

New York state has missed every federally imposed deadline for providing accessible voting machines, and won’t be in compliance for the upcoming February presidential primary.

One of the most pressing issues is providing accessible voting machines for the disabled. New York currently has at least one such machine in each county, but federal law requires one at each polling place.

“Continued foot dragging in New York state is, in our opinion, an outrage,” said Susan Dooha, executive director of nonprofit The Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York. “New York has not taken the civil rights of voters with disabilities seriously.”

From Bloomberg.com:

Voters in New Jersey

… passed a revision to language in the constitution describing people who would be denied the right to vote. The amendment replaces the phrase ‘idiot or insane person” with “a person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting.”

Senate President Richard Codey, a mental-health advocate who sponsored the language change, said the measure would “erase more than 150 years of discrimination in New Jersey’s constitution.”

The words “idiot” or “insane” remain in the voter eligibility language of constitutions in at least seven other states. See earlier post here.

From Newsday:

Tuesday’s ballot in New Jersey asked voters to decide whether to eliminate insensitive phrasing in the state constitution that characterizes people with disabilities as “idiots” and “insane.”

The offensive language, adopted in the constitution in 1844, is aimed at barring people with limited mental capacity from voting: “No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage.”

At least seven other states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico and Ohio — have the words “idiot” or “insane” in their constitutions to define who can vote.

New York’s El Diario endorsed the change, quoting from the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill.

Calling people with various mental and physical disabilities “idiots” or “insane” is cruel and offensive. No one should do it and our New Jersey constitution certainly shouldn’t lend legitimacy to anyone who does use those terms to describe disabled people.

An endorsement also came from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

By Susan Cohen, writing in the opinion section of the Albany Times Union:

People with disabilities want, and in many cases are expected, to be productive members of society. That includes owning or renting property, working, paying taxes and going to the polls to exercise their voting rights.

Yet these same successful, tax-paying New Yorkers still cannot vote independently and privately. Those who need assistance with current voting machines must have two people — one from each major political party — go into the voting booth with them. Can you imagine having a cozy party of three in the booth while you are voting?

Some individuals cannot get into their polling place because they can’t grasp the door handles, the ramp is badly constructed or some other barrier blocks accessibility. Some can’t get accessible transportation to the polls, and some find their poll workers uninformed and rude when they try to vote. In 2006 and the 2007 primary, many people with disabilities had to travel up to 50 miles to find an accessible voting machine.

According to the American Association of Persons with Disabilities (AAPD), the 2000 census reports that one in five Americans said they had some form of disability. That’s 20 percent of the population — more than enough of a margin to win an election.

Jim Dixon, director of the association’s national vote project, calls individuals with disabilities “the sleeping giants of American politics.”

Read the rest of Cohen’s column here.

Cohen is a project coordinator at the New York State Independent Living Council and coordinator of New Yorkers with Disabilities Getting Equal Voting Access.

A state-sponsored inspection of polling places in New Jersey has found that only one in five of those checked met legal requirements for disability access.

Among the problems found were lack of ramps, narrow doorways and inaccessible parking.

State Public Advocate Ronald Chen, whose office conducted the inspections, said the results were particularly “disturbing” because many of the failing sites had passed county-level inspections.

Chen said government oversight is “failing” with the November elections less than two months away. “Every citizen should be concerned when any group or individual is denied the opportunity to exercise his or her voting right privately and independently,” he said.

About 300,000 of New Jersey’s voting-age residents use wheelchairs, canes, crutches or walkers. Federal laws requiring accessible polling places have been in effect for fifteen years.