One of the last times I voted in person, a poll worker handed me my ballot, gave me a pen, and said, “Just vote here.” No privacy screen. No wheelchair-height booth. Just a cleared-off corner of the table where election workers had been sitting all morning, in full view of everyone coming to receive their ballot.
To someone without a disability, that might seem like a reasonable accommodation. But to disabled voters, it was a clear message: We weren’t expecting you, we don’t know the law and we didn’t consider your privacy and dignity.
That experience is not unusual. Unfortunately, it’s the norm for the more than 2 million disabled Michiganders across our state.
We at Detroit Disability Power just released our 2025 Polling Place Accessibility Report, and the findings continue a concerning pattern: Of 415 Election Day polling locations assessed across seven Michigan counties, 90% failed to meet basic legal accessibility standards for voters with disabilities. This is the third consecutive election cycle that number has gotten worse, up from 87% failing in 2024, and 84% in 2022.
9 out of 10 polling places didn’t clear the bar
Federal law requires accessibility be provided in four areas: accessible parking and pathways, an accessible entrance, a Voter Assist Terminal set up and ready to use and a wheelchair-height voting booth, also set up and ready to use. In southeast Michigan, nine out of ten polling places couldn’t clear that bar.
Ironically, the single largest issue area at polling locations was found to be the Voter Assist Terminal, the device specifically put in polling places to assist disabled voters in casting their ballots privately and independently.
Fortunately, the majority of issues with the these terminals are easy fixes that could be remedied with a little forethought and no money. With additional planning, the terminals could be positioned to ensure a voter’s secrecy; with better training the terminal headphones and controllers would be plugged in and ready for a voter to use. And with clear guidance, terminals would be placed far enough away from other barriers that wheelchair users could position themselves to use these devices.
A system problem, not a clerk problem
As we zoom out, this is not a story about bad clerks or poll workers. Michigan has more than 1,500 election jurisdictions, each administered by a clerk who selects polling locations, trains poll workers and bears responsibility for accessibility. They often do so on a departmental budget with no capital improvement funds and no standardized state support. Clerks across this state are working extremely hard. Many want to do better and genuinely don’t know how, or can’t afford to. That is a system problem, and it demands a system-level response from our state.
More than 30% of Michigan’s voting-age adults have a disability. We are not a special interest or niche group. We are your neighbors, your family members, your coworkers.
And we are tired of showing up to exercise our most fundamental right and being told, in ways loud and quiet, that we were not planned for.
There’s time to fix this
Laws protecting disabled voters, like the ADA, are not the ceiling. They are the floor. And we are not even meeting that.
What we need now is not sympathy, it is action. We are calling on the Michigan Legislature to fund accessibility improvements and require jurisdictions to report whether their accessible voting equipment is actually being used. We are calling on the Secretary of State’s office to standardize poll worker training statewide. And we are urging local clerks: Reach out to us.
Detroit Disability Power will sit down with any clerk who wants to understand the barries specific to their own jurisdiction, go site by site, and build a real path toward accessible elections before Michigan voters head to the polls again this summer and fall.
Our poll auditors are disabled voters who showed up because they were tired of having no proof for what they already knew from experience. The information we gathered isn’t just a dataset; it is the result of our community deciding that our exclusion would no longer go undocumented and unaccounted for.
If you’re a clerk reading this, we are not coming with clipboards to “catch you” breaking the law. We are coming with data and a genuine offer to help. Contact us at DetroitDisabilityPower.org/pollaudits.
The barriers are known. The fixes exist. The next election is three months away.
Dessa Cosma is the Executive Director of Detroit Disability Power, a non-profit she founded in 2018 to grow the political power of the disability community. Her career has spanned reproductive rights, economic justice, and anti-racism education. She serves on the board of the ACLU of Michigan. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters and we may publish it in print or online.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: We audited Michigan polling places. 9 in 10 failed. | Opinion
Reporting by Dessa Cosma, Op-ed contributor / Detroit Free Press
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