Federal law has promised disabled voters a private, independent ballot since 1965. This fall, the one method that reliably delivers it is at risk.

---

On September 4, North Carolina became the first state to mail ballots for the November midterm elections. Some of those envelopes went to people who cannot stand in line for extended periods, cannot drive to a polling place, or cannot read a paper ballot without someone else reading it to them. Whether the rest of the country’s mail ballots will be sent depends on an upcoming Supreme Court ruling.

This fall, disabled voters are at risk of losing a voting method that removes the parking lot, the door, the line, the booth, and the poll worker reading the choices out loud as the federal government considers checkpoints that could undermine their rights.

One in six eligible voters has a disability

There were a projected 40.2 million people with disabilities eligible to vote in the 2024 election, according to Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research^.[1] That is roughly one in six eligible voters, larger than either the eligible Black or Hispanic electorate. A third of eligible voters either have a disability or live with someone who does.^[2]

Those are almost certainly undercounts, since the figures come from self-reporting, and a lot of people managing mobility, vision, or cognitive conditions do not call themselves disabled on a survey. Nearly half of Americans over age 75 have a disability, and the country is getting older^.[2] As Dom Kelly of New Disabled South stated to NPR, disability is the only minority group anyone can join at any time.^[3]

The failure is not registration. The Election Assistance Commission put the registration difference between disabled and nondisabled citizens at half a percentage point in 2022.^[4] The real issue is turnout. In 2022, 4.9% of eligible disabled voters tried to vote and could not, against 2.9% of nondisabled voters, a gap of roughly half a million people.^[2]

Four federal laws already promise a private, independent ballot

There is a stack of federal voting statutes that define access for disabled Americans, each one written to patch a hole the last one left.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 includes the often-overlooked Section 208, which explicitly grants voters who need help because of blindness, disability, or inability to read the right to bring an assistant of their choosing into the booth. The law also prohibits literacy tests and reading or writing requirements, reinforcing legal protections for voters with disabilities.^[5]

The Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984 required accessible polling places for federal elections and, where none existed, an alternate way to vote on Election Day. It also required large-print instructions and telecommunications access for deaf voters.^[5] It had no real enforcement mechanism, and compliance drifted for the next decade.

Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act provides an actual framework for access. It requires state and local governments to make every program, service, and activity accessible to people with disabilities, and voting is a program. That includes registration, the polling place, the ballot itself, the election office website, and the form you fill out to request an absentee ballot. The Department of Justice’s polling place checklist, hosted at archive.ada.gov, covers parking, the route from the car, the entrance, and the voting area in explicit detail.^[6]

In 2024, DOJ finalized a Title II rule that set a technical standard for accessible content on government websites. Governments serving 50,000 or more people originally had until April 2026 to comply. Four days before the deadline, the department pushed it to April 2027 and moved smaller governments and special districts to April 2028. The same interim rule states that covered entities have an ongoing obligation under Title II to make their web content and mobile apps accessible regardless of the compliance dates^.[7] So a county whose ballot request form fails a screen reader has another seven months before a specific, testable standard applies, and no relief at all from the general one.

The Help America Vote Act of 2002 emerged from the 2000 election Florida recount. It required at least one accessible voting system at every polling place in a federal election, one that gives disabled voters the same opportunity for access and participation that everyone else gets. HAVA paid for the equipment, created the Election Assistance Commission, and set up a complaint process in every state.^[5]

Together, these statutes are meant to ensure that disabled voters get into the building, get to the machine, mark a ballot without anyone else seeing it, and cast it. That is the legal standard of privacy and independence. Reality is not that clear-cut.

Eight in ten polling places had at least one barrier

The Government Accountability Office sent inspectors to 178 polling places during the 2016 election. 83% had at least one potential barrier. The most common were outside the door: steep ramps, missing accessible parking, gravel paths, and poor signage. Inside, more than a third had no place where a voter with a disability could mark a ballot privately. Most had an accessible machine, but only a few had put it somewhere a person could use it without an audience.^[8]

That was a decade ago, and the EAC’s post-election surveys say things improved and then stalled. Disabled voters who cast ballots in person reported difficulties at a 20% rate in 2022, against 6% for nondisabled voters.^[4] The problems are structural. A long line is a wall for someone who cannot stand for forty minutes. A cramped room proves difficult for a wheelchair to navigate. A ballot marking device sitting in the corner, unplugged, because the poll workers were trained on it once in 2019 and cannot remember which button starts audio mode, is a barrier for a blind voter.

A barrier no checklist captures is transportation. The National Household Travel Survey counted 25.5 million adults with travel-limiting disabilities.^[2] West Virginia has the highest disability rate in the country and some of the lowest disabled turnout, and its mountains and limited transit are the likely reason.^[2]

Then there is the issue of ballot assistance. Before ballot marking devices were common, a blind voter could bring someone or have an election judge read the ballot aloud. Colorado Public Radio’s reporting on Boulder County’s 2024 rollout included voters describing interpreters who offered their own opinions on the candidates while reading them^.[9]

Mail ballots remove the building but not the paper

Mail voting removes the building, the line, and the ride. It does not remove the paper.

A standard mail ballot is a sheet of small print, filled in with a pen, folded into an envelope, signed on a line a blind voter cannot see, and returned by a deadline printed in eight-point type. In 2022, 6.1% of disabled mail voters reported difficulty reading, receiving, returning, or understanding their ballot. For nondisabled mail voters, the figure was 0.3%.[^4]

The fixes exist but are unevenly implemented across the map. At least 13 states still require an excuse to vote by mail, meaning a disabled voter must attest to a condition or inability before the accommodation is granted, and must repeat the process every cycle.^[10] Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have run at least some elections entirely by mail.^[10] Electronic ballot delivery, where a voter downloads an accessible ballot, marks it with a screen reader, and prints it, is available in many states for military and overseas voters and in a very limited number of states for disabled voters at home. Electronic return, where the marked ballot goes back without printing, is rarer and usually limited to voters who can document a print disability. Several states require a witness or a notary on the return envelope. Some restrict who may return another person’s ballot, which in practice criminalizes a home health aide dropping a client’s envelope in a mailbox.

Every one of those steps is a place where a ballot gets rejected for a reason that has nothing to do with whether the voter is eligible. A signature that no longer matches the one on file from a decade ago, because the voter’s hand has changed. An envelope that arrived a day late because the voter depends on someone else to mail it. A missing witness because the voter lives alone.

Disabled voters left the polling place for the mailbox

In both 2020 and 2022, disabled voters chose mail ballots at a rate about 10 points higher than nondisabled voters.^[2] States that expanded mail access between 2018 and 2022 saw disabled voter turnout go up; states that did not saw no significant change. No-excuse absentee voting and permanent absentee lists correlated with the biggest gains.^[4]

The EAC’s own explanation for why polling place difficulties dropped so sharply between 2012 and 2020 is striking. Roughly half of the improvement came from the voters with the most severe disabilities leaving the polling place for the mailbox.^[4] Polling places didn’t really improve; people who faced barriers stopped going.

Mail voting is not a convenience for disabled voters. It is the accommodation the rest of the system has quietly come to rely on.

Colorado sends the ballot first and builds accommodations after

Colorado has mailed a ballot to every active registered voter since 2013, when the legislature passed the Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act. Voters return them by mail, at drop boxes, or at Voter Service and Polling Centers, which replaced precinct polling places and let anyone vote anywhere in their county. Most Coloradans never see the inside of a polling place, and the state’s turnout is routinely near the top of the country.

For disabled voters, the state kept building on accessible infrastructure.

During the 22 days before an election, any voter with a disability can go to myballot.coloradosos.gov and mark an accessible ballot with their own assistive technology. Most voters then print the ballot and an application, sign it or attach a copy of ID, and return it by mail, drop box, or in person. Voters who are blind, have a visual or reading disability that cannot be corrected, or cannot physically hold or mark a ballot can return it electronically without printing anything.^[11] The legislature created this in 2019 with Senate Bill 19-202 and expanded it in 2021 with Senate Bill 21-188, which let voters mark ballots electronically at polling centers and then sign and cast them the same way everyone else does^.[9]

Every Colorado voter service and polling center has ballot marking devices with audio, tactile keypads with braille labels, touchscreens, and sip-and-puff or switch inputs. In Boulder County, election judges were trained to give blind voters the number of steps to the chair instead of saying “take a seat.” Dawn Brady, a blind vision coach who cast her first fully independent ballot in 2024, described walking her sealed envelope to the drop box herself: “I have never in my life felt so empowered.”^[9]

The Secretary of State’s accessible voting page is also unusual in that it admits some polling centers will not fully comply and tells clerks what to do: temporary signs and cones for accessible parking, portable ramps, doorstops to prop heavy doors, and a direct link to the DOJ checklist.^[11]

Voters get text or email notifications when their ballot is mailed, received, and accepted. All but three states now offer some form of ballot tracking with the Postal Service,^[10] but Colorado pairs it with a cure process: if a signature is flagged, the county contacts the voter and gives them a window to fix it. For a voter whose signature has changed with a progressive condition, that window is the difference between a counted ballot and a rejected one.

Colorado, though a standout for accessible voting, is not perfect. Ballots must arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day, with no postmark grace, putting voters who depend on someone else to mail their ballot on a tight deadline. Electronic-return eligibility is narrowly written, so a voter with severe mobility impairments plus cognitive fatigue may or may not qualify depending on how a clerk reads the statute. The print-and-return path assumes a working printer, which a household on a fixed income is unlikely to have. And a ballot marking device is only as good as the last poll worker who tested it.

But the order of operations is right. Colorado starts with the default ballot, gets it to the voter where they are, then builds accommodations for the people the default still missed. In most states, this is reversed.

A new USPS rule puts a checkpoint on every envelope.

On March 31, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Its mail voting provisions direct the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile a list of verified citizens for each state, and direct the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters on a state-specific participation list.^[12]

The Postal Service proposed a rule in May and finalized it August 26, less than seventy days before the election. Under it, states must submit their ballot envelope designs to USPS for advance approval, print an Election Mail logo and a unique voter-linked barcode on every envelope, and upload a list of every mail voter to a federal portal that, as of mid-September, does not exist. Outbound ballots that do not comply, or that are addressed to someone not on the uploaded list, will not be accepted for delivery.^[13] A whistleblower complaint in early September said the system had never been properly tested and warned of “catastrophic failure.” It said millions of voters might not get their ballots on time or at all.^[14]

The envelope review is already happening. Leon County, Florida, submitted its outgoing envelopes and was rejected by email on September 2 because the “return service requested” line sat 0.236 inches (6 mm) from the return address instead of the required quarter inch. Those envelopes had carried tens of thousands of ballots in 2024 and in the 2026 primary without a problem. The county is using them anyway, because there is no time to print new ones before Florida’s September 24 mailing deadline.^[14]

The litigation has moved fast. The Supreme Court ruled on August 24, in Trump v. California, that a challenge filed before the rule was final was premature.^[15] The rule became final three days before that decision, and the states and a coalition led by the League of Women Voters refiled. On September 4, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston issued a preliminary injunction blocking the delivery-refusal provisions through November 3, finding the rule likely unconstitutional and disenfranchisement “practically inevitable” if enforced. She noted the record contained no evidence of mail voting fraud to justify the timeline.^[16] The First Circuit refused to lift the injunction on September 10. The administration had already gone to the Supreme Court before the appeals court ruled, which is unusual, asking for a stay. The question before the justices is narrow: whether the rule can take effect for this election while the constitutional challenge continues. The merits case goes on either way.[14]

Twenty states have mailed ballots or will within the week, and the federal deadline for military and overseas ballots falls the week of September 14. The rule would require new envelopes for roughly 10,000 state and local election jurisdictions, most of which have already printed theirs. Secretaries of state from Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Georgia, and Kansas, along with Utah’s lieutenant governor and about two dozen local officials, filed a brief that took no position on the rule’s legality but told the Court that late changes breed confusion and confusion keeps eligible voters home. The Postal Service has not said whether a ballot a voter already received by mail can be returned by mail if the rule takes effect midstream.^[14]

The Court also has its own doctrine to reckon with. The Purcell principle, from a 2006 Arizona case, counsels federal courts against changing election rules close to an election because officials cannot adapt and voters get confused. Courts usually invoke it to avoid intervening. Here the administration is asking the Court to let a rule take effect after ballots have started moving, which is the doctrine turned inside out.^[10] In parallel, the White House has pressed Congress to write the same restrictions into statute through the SAVE America Act, which has not passed.^{[10, 12]}

The rule hits hardest where there is no fallback.

This mail-voting rule adds a new point of failure between the election office and the mailbox. Currently, if a county clerk sends a ballot, the Postal Service only has to deliver it. Under the new rule, the Postal Service first checks the envelope design, then the barcode, then the voter against a list uploaded to a portal that did not exist a year ago. Each check is a chance to hold a valid ballot.

Disabled voters are overrepresented on the mail rolls. They vote by mail at a rate ten points higher than everyone else.^[2] Any friction applied to mail ballots lands on them first. The ACLU’s case filing names disabled voters, alongside military members, overseas citizens, and older people, as the populations most exposed.^[16]

Citizenship lists built from federal databases misfire. NPR has documented U.S. citizens wrongly flagged as noncitizens by the DHS SAVE system the order relies on.^[12] A transposed digit in a Social Security record, a name change after marriage, a naturalization that predates digital records: any of these can drop a person off the list. If the list controls delivery, the error controls the ballot.

And voters who cannot travel have no fallback. For months, election officials have told worried voters to skip the mail on the return trip and use a drop box or walk the ballot into the county office^.[14] That advice assumes a car, a ride, or a body that can make the trip. A voter with a travel-limiting disability, one of 25.5 million, does not have that option. For them, an undelivered ballot is a lost vote.

The executive order’s stated purpose is to prevent noncitizens from voting, and the broader campaign rests on the claim that mail ballots are a vehicle for fraud. The numbers do not add up. A Brookings Institution review of the 2016 through 2022 general elections put the mail voting fraud rate at about four cases per 10 million mail votes. A UCLA Voting Rights Project brief found 31 credible cases of voter impersonation out of a billion votes cast.^[10] The one real mail ballot scheme of recent memory, in North Carolina’s ninth congressional district in 2018, was caught, investigated, and produced a thrown-out election. The existing safeguards did their job.^[10] The president, vocal in wanting this order enacted, votes by mail.^[10]

Mail-in voting had one ruling in its favor earlier this year. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, decided June 29, the Court held 5 to 4 that federal law does not bar states from counting ballots postmarked by Election Day and received afterward. The RNC had wanted to end postmark grace periods nationwide^.[17]

The envelope shows up, or the vote does not count.

Federal law has long described an accessible election. Polling places have to be reachable and usable. The voting system has to let a disabled voter mark and cast a ballot privately and on their own. Websites must be accessible, with a specific technical standard arriving in 2027. Since 1965, a voter who needs help has had the right to pick who gives it.

Colorado shows what meeting those standards looks like: working from a default instead of adding exceptions. Send the ballot to the voter. Offer an accessible electronic version for the 22 days it matters. Put working machines in every center and train the people running them. Tell voters where their ballot is and give them a chance to fix a flagged signature. Colorado did this with technology that existed in 2013, and most of the country still hasn’t.

The federal rule runs the other way. It puts a checkpoint on every envelope, ties delivery to a list built from databases known to misfire, and sets a deadline that election officials in both major political parties say they can’t meet. The ballots that fail those checks will not fail at random. They will fail for the voters who had the fewest alternatives to begin with, and no order from Boston or Washington can put a missed ballot back in the mail in time.

Widespread absentee voting in this country started in 1864, when most Union states let soldiers vote from the field because the alternative was not voting at all.^[18] Disabled voters are asking for the same thing. The envelope shows up, and the vote counts.

---

Footnotes

1. Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse, “Projecting the Number of Eligible Voters with Disabilities in the November 2024 Elections,” Rutgers University Program for Disability Research, October 2024, https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-research-engagement/program-disability-research/voter-turnout-and-voting-accessibility.
2. MIT Election Data and Science Lab, “Voting accessibility,” updated June 20, 2024, https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-accessibility.
3. “1 in 6 voters has a disability. That voting bloc is growing as the population ages,” NPR Morning Edition, October 31, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/10/31/nx-s1-5161357/1-in-6-voters-has-a-disability-that-voting-bloc-is-growing-as-the-population-ages.
4. Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse, “Disability and Voting Accessibility in the 2022 Elections,” U.S. Election Assistance Commission and Rutgers University, July 2023, https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/EAC_2023_Rutgers_Report_FINAL.pdf; Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse, “Voting Experiences Since HAVA: Perspectives of People with Disabilities,” U.S. Election Assistance Commission and Rutgers University, 2024, https://www.eac.gov/research-and-data
5. U.S. Department of Justice, “The Americans with Disabilities Act and Other Federal Laws Protecting the Rights of Voters with Disabilities,” https://www.ada.gov/resources/protecting-voter-rights/; USA.gov, “Voter accessibility laws,” https://www.usa.gov/voter-accessibility-laws.
6. U.S. Department of Justice, “ADA Checklist for Polling Places,” https://archive.ada.gov/votingck.htm.
7. U.S. Department of Justice, “Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities,” Interim Final Rule, 91 FR 20902, April 20, 2026, https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2026-07663. The original rule is 89 FR 31320, April 24, 2024.
8. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Voters with Disabilities: Observations on Polling Place Accessibility and Related Federal Guidance,” GAO-18-4, October 2017, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-4.
9. Haylee May, “Accessible voting machines mean disabled Colorado voters could enjoy more privacy and safety this Election Day,” Colorado Public Radio, October 30, 2024, https://www.cpr.org/2024/10/30/accessible-voting-machines-in-colorado/.
10. George Chidi, “Trump’s attempted crackdown on mail-in voting: here’s what to know,” The Guardian, September 13, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/13/trump-voting-by-mail-explainer.
11. Colorado Secretary of State, “Accessible Voting,” https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/accessibleVoting.html; “FAQs: Electors with Disabilities,” https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/FAQs/ElectorsWithDisabilities.html.
12. Ashley Lopez and Benjamin Swasey, “Trump signs a new executive order on voting. Experts say he lacks the authority,” NPR, March 31, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5508948/trump-voter-list-mail-ballots-executive-order.
13. Congressional Research Service, “USPS Ballot Mail Rule: Overview and Potential Impact,” IF13297, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF13297.
14. Sarah D. Wire, “Mail-in ballot rules spark voter confusion. Where do things stand?,” USA Today, updated September 12, 2026, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/09/12/mail-in-ballots-already-sent-supreme-court/91691276007/.
15. Hansi Lo Wang, “USPS plan to restrict mail-in voting remains blocked after appeals panel ruling,” NPR, updated September 10, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/09/03/nx-s1-5955614/trump-mail-in-voting-ruling-court-usps.
16. American Civil Liberties Union, “Federal Court Blocks U.S. Postal Service from Interfering with Mail Ballots in November Election,” September 4, 2026, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-blocks-u-s-postal-service-from-interfering-with-mail-ballots-in-november-election.
17. Watson v. Republican National Committee, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), decided June 29, 2026.
18. Smithsonian Institution, “A History of Voting by Mail,” Smithsonian Snapshot, September 19, 2024, https://www.si.edu/collections/snapshot/history-voting-mail.

Additional resources

• U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Voting Accessibility: https://www.eac.gov/voting-accessibility
• Rocky Mountain ADA Center, Accessible Voting: https://rockymountainada.org/topics/government/accessible-voting
• Pam Fessler, “Disabled voters fight for more accessible polling places,” NPR, October 24, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/10/24/499177544/disabled-voters-fight-for-more-accessible-polling-places
• SCOTUSblog coverage of U.S. Postal Service v. California, Nos. 26A297 and 26A305, September 2026