Changes benefit state’s disabled voters

OLYMPIA – Mike Corsini has relied on others to help him vote for more than two decades. Next month, he will roll his wheelchair into a voting booth and select his favored candidates through a touch-sensitive electronic screen – the first ballot he’ll cast on his own since an injury rendered him a quadriplegic 28 years ago.

Corsini, 43, will be able to vote on an electronic voting machine configured specially for use by the blind and the disabled, allowing them access to voting in a completely private way – the first time such equipment has been available statewide.

Corsini, of Spanaway, has voted by mail in Pierce County for a decade. But even then he needed help because he can’t grasp things in his hands. Now, all he’ll need to do is press on the touch screen machine to register his vote.

“When you’re a person with a disability and you need assistance you lose privacy,” said Corsini, who has been paralyzed since a motorcycle accident at the age of 15.

“Getting it back is a real treat,” he said.

Under new federal election requirements that took effect this year, all polling places must be handicapped accessible and counties that have switched to vote by mail must have at least one electronic voting machine available for blind and disabled voters. At least 1,000 of these machines – offering different configurations for various disabilities – will be in use across the state.

Blind and disabled voters will be able to vote on the machines as early as Wednesday.

While Snohomish and Yakima counties previously had electronic voting systems in place that provided many of the features of the disabled access units, state elections director Nick Handy said all of the counties have newer versions that offer more functions – headsets for the visually impaired, and systems for quadriplegics to be able to vote, including a system where they sip or blow into a straw to make their selection.

Disabled and visually impaired voters are among the few who may actually go to the polls to vote this primary.

Earlier this year, the state gave counties a green light to switch to all-mail voting. Before the new law, 70 percent of the state’s registered voters had already cast their ballots by mail and several counties had already switched to running elections completely by mail.

But now, 34 of the state’s 39 counties are officially vote by mail, and Secretary of State Sam Reed said he expects at least 80 percent of next months’ ballots to be cast by mail. Even in counties that still retain polling places – including King and Pierce – most voters are still expected to vote by mail.

Handy said that in counties that are vote by mail, voters can still choose to vote on the disabled access machines, even if they are not disabled or blind. The counties will require that that voter be credited with voting at the time of using the disability access unit, and an absentee ballot sent later would be rejected.

Counties must send out more than 2 million absentee ballots by Friday. They must be postmarked by Sept. 19.

Other changes are in store as well.

For voters in counties that still conduct poll site voting, there will be a voter-verified paper trail for the electronic disability access machines. In some cases, voters will be able to see a printout of the ballot they have just cast, though they won’t be able to take it with them. In others, the voter puts a paper ballot into the machine and then uses a touch screen to make choices. The machine then “marks” the ballot for the voter, who takes the completed ballot to the ballot box.

This is also the last time that the primary will be held in September.

A new law that takes effect next year moves the primary forward a full month, from the third week in September to the third Tuesday in August.

Elections officials have long argued that the state’s September primary, one of the latest in the country, has disenfranchised many military and overseas voters and hasn’t allowed adequate turnaround time between the primary and general elections.