Disability Voting News: November 26, 2025
Welcome back to the Accessible Voting Booth! This week we are talking about more attempts to restrict mail-in voting (boo), but we’ll end on a happier note by discussing the accessibility of Anchorage’s voting options (yay). Note: I will only do one issue of the Accessible Voting Booth in December due to the holidays! The last edition for 2025 will be either on Wednesday, December 10 or Wednesday, December 17--depending on the voting news I have available at the time--and then I’ll be back in January.
The Hawaii State Elections Commission calls for end to mail-in voting (via Hawaii News Now).
Hawaii’s bipartisan State Elections Commission voted 5-3 to recommend ending voting by mail. Under this proposal, they recommend that voting is only available on Election Day in person with ID required on hand-counted paper ballots. Only military and voters with disabilities would be allowed to vote absentee. You read that right. Not only would there not be vote by mail, but there wouldn’t be early voting either under this proposal.
Hawaii is one of eight states with a universal mail-in voting system. In 2024, 92.5% of voters voted by mail. The Commission's proposal would be an overwhelming upheaval of the entire state’s voting system, based on the ongoing claim by Trump and other Republicans (as covered in the last edition of the newsletter where we discussed Georgia’s State Election Board voting to recommend the end of no-excuse absentee voting) that vote by mail is rife with fraud.
Luckily, Senate Judiciary Chair Karl Rhoads says this disastrous recommendation has nearly no chance of being approved by the legislature. The negative implications for voting access are significant, even if there is a carve-out for voters with disabilities. Some voters may not know of exceptions for voters with disabilities or may not feel “disabled enough” to utilize an accommodation. The lack of an early voting period means that the majority of voters would be forced to go to polling places on Election Day. Hawaiian election officials and poll workers would not only have to roll out a major shift where all voters are in person, but they would all be in person on the same day, increasing the likelihood of long lines, delays, and technical challenges as poll workers and election officials adjust an influx of voters who previously voted by mail. And of course, removing vote by mail would reduce access for almost all voters who are accustomed to the flexibility that this system provides, but particularly those who have to work on Election Day or who have difficulty traveling to the polling place.
Arizona lawmakers propose ballot measure to restrict mail voting (via The Markup).
Arizona Republicans have pre-filed a proposed ballot measure that would make several changes to voting, including abolishing the state’s “active early-voter list” (permanent mail voter list), requiring proof of citizenship to receive a mail ballot, and ending early voting the Friday before Election Day. As you may recall, Arizona currently has a documentary proof of citizenship requirement that has resulted in bifurcated voter rolls: voters who provide documentary proof of citizenship can vote for all offices on the ballot and ballot measures, while voters who don’t provide DPOC can only vote for federal offices (President, U.S. House of Representatives, and Senate).
If the Arizona legislature approves the ballot measure, it will appear on the 2026 ballot, and voters will have to decide whether to approve it. But with Arizona’s bifurcated rolls, only voters who have provided documentary proof of citizenship would be allowed to vote on this ballot measure.
As of 2023, Arizona had over 32,000 federal-only voters among its 4.4 million voters, and a Votebeat analysis found that 18- to 24-year-olds were three times more likely to be federal-only voters than people over the age of 24. Furthermore, they found that the two precincts in Arizona with over 1,000 federal-only voters were located in the areas of the University of Arizona campus in Tucson and the Arizona State University campus in Tempe. This means that if this ballot measure is approved, college students in Arizona are disproportionately less likely to be able to vote on the ballot measure due to not fulfilling the DPOC requirement.
We’ll just have to keep an eye on this ballot measure, which is following in the trend of Republican legislators attempting to restrict access to mail-in voting in line with the Trump administration’s wishes.
Anchorage, AK, to offer online voting option in April municipal election (via The Alaska Current).
Anchorage, Alaska will allow all voters to vote via a secure document portal in the upcoming April municipal election. This has caused controversy, catching the eye of the New York Times who characterized this as a new, novel, and controversial approach. However, as The Alaska Current points out, Anchorage has allowed voters to cast ballots via email and fax since 2018. The online portal was created as a safer alternative to voting via email and fax. Anchorage Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz put out a statement responding to the New York Times’s claim that this voting system is a new experiment, clarifying that electronic voting options aren’t new, are secure, and that these accommodations are used by very few voters who benefit from greater flexibility and accessibility:
“Like our other accessible voting options, voters must apply to vote by secure document portal before Election Day. The voter is required to provide a personal identifier to maintain election security. The MOA Elections Team then activates the voter’s portal. Voters log in using their personal identifier and a unique PIN to complete a virtual ballot by 8:00 P.M. on Election Day. Their virtual ballot is transmitted to the MOA Election Center, where it is printed and processed alongside all other returned ballots.
“Two electronic voting options have been available to the public since 2018: voting by email or by fax. On average, fewer than 200 voters request accommodations to vote electronically. In the 2025 Regular Municipal Election, we offered those voters the option to vote by secure document portal in addition to the options to vote by email and by fax. Of the 60,455 total ballots cast in the 2025 Regular Municipal Election, 147 voters voted electronically and the majority - 136 voters - chose to vote via the secure document portal.”
Electronic voting has long been criticized and opposed by election security advocates, but it provides important accessibility features for voters with disabilities for whom voting by mail is not fully accessible. For print disabled voters, including voters who are blind or have low vision, voters with mobility disabilities that make independently marking a ballot difficult, and voters with learning disabilities who may have difficulty reading a ballot, electronic ballots are far more accessible. They allow voters to use their own assistive technology to read, mark, and verify a ballot.
However, while many states allow voters to receive and mark a ballot electronically, most of them require the voter to print, sign, and return the ballot by mail or in person, which is not fully accessible. Someone who is blind or has low vision is less likely to own a printer, and they may not be able to independently sign a ballot envelope, pack their ballot, and mail it. Electronic ballot return makes the remote voting process fully accessible to these voters.
Election security advocates believe that electronic voting (and particularly electronic return of marked ballots) cannot be fully secured and that there is no system that cannot be hacked. But I’ve always maintained that requiring voters with disabilities to use inaccessible systems where they are forced to have others assist them when they want to vote independently is also not secure.
Many states offer electronic ballot delivery, and fewer offer electronic return, but these are often tightly restricted to overseas and military voters and (even less often) voters with print disabilities. One thing I like about Anchorage’s system is that it doesn’t put specific requirements on who can use these options. Any registered voter can vote electronically if they need and want to. Critics of this system may argue that if electronic voting is open to all, voters will flock to use electronic voting. But the data from the 2025 Regular Municipal Election in Anchorage shows that only 0.2% of voters who participated opted to use electronic voting, and only 11 of those voters decided to vote via email or fax (the less secure options as opposed to the secure document portal). As Heinz explains, the majority of those who opt to vote electronically choose to do so because both voting in person and by mail are less accessible to them: “Since the implementation of Vote-By-Mail in 2018, we have offered electronic voting options to all registered voters, specifically to make secure voting accessible to those stationed overseas, attending college, or working on the slope and unable to vote from home during the time of the election.”
Anchorage’s system can serve as a model of what truly accessible voting looks like: it offers a full range of voting options, including in-person on Election Day and in-person absentee voting, no-excuse vote by mail, and electronic ballot delivery and return. Voters are able to choose the option that works best for them without any restriction. This means that voters with disabilities who would benefit from voting electronically can do so without having to jump through any hoops to prove they have the “right type” of disability to need to vote electronically. At a time when many states are moving to restrict absentee voting and when both Democrats and Republicans have called for hand-marked paper ballots, Anchorage’s system provides an almost radical level of accessibility and entrusts voters to choose a voting method that meets their needs and preferences.
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