New Louisiana election laws creating challenges for voters with disabilities

Source: CBS News

November 2, 2024 / 8:30 AM EDT


New laws aimed at protecting the 2024 presidential election from fears about fraud are creating unexpected barriers for some of the nation's more than 40.2 million voters with disabilities, disability rights advocates have told CBS News. Laws in more than 20 states now restrict various elements of mail-in ballots including limiting the kinds of assistance a voter can ask for. Restrictions like those limit the ability of health aides and nurses to help prepare a ballot for the people they care for – and some even threaten criminal charges for aides who help too many people to vote.

"If I owned a nursing home or a group home, I [would] put out a memo to my staff saying, 'don't help anybody out because if you end up helping two people out by mistake, you could, could go to jail,'" said Andrew Bizer, a disability rights attorney in New Orleans. "And it also puts the folks with disabilities in a really terrible situation." Many of the new laws came after the 2020 elections when former President Donald Trump questioned the security of mail-in voting.

A new study released by the Rutgers Program for Disability Research found that there has been a 5.1% increase in people with disabilities eligible to vote in 2020. Among that growing population, 7.1 million eligible voters with disabilities live in seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. This shows the potential impacts that restrictive mail-in voting laws could have in next week's election.

One state confronting this problem is Louisiana. In late May, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed a series of laws aimed at increasing the state's "election integrity." The laws were first championed by Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry who called them "a boost" to the state's election protection efforts. She pledged those efforts would "bring us closer to being ranked first in the nation for election integrity."

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-louisiana-election-laws-challenges-voters-with-disabilities/

---

Link to Rutgers Program for Disability Research STUDY (PDF) - https://smlr.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/Documents/Centers/Program_Disability_Research/Disability_Electorate_Projections_Report_Oct2024.pdf

Disability Rights Louisiana lawsuit PRESS RELEASE - DISABILITY RIGHTS LOUISIANA FILES LAWSUIT TO STOP NEW LAWS THAT SUPPRESS THE VOTE OF INDIVIDUALS WITH DISABILITIES

Link to DOJ Civil Rights Division case site - Disability Rights Louisiana v. Landry

Link to DOJ Civil Rights Division Statement of interest court FILING (PDF) - https://www.justice.gov/media/1375441/dl