Disability Vote and REV Up! Campaign Make Headlines with Time Magazine Article

Last week Time magazine wrote an article featuring a Rutgers University report which found an 8.5 percent increase in the amount of people with disabilities who voted in the November 2018 election, with a total of 14.3 million voters with disabilities participating in the election. While people with disabilities vote at a lower rate than their peers without disabilities, the report notes that if that gap were closed an additional 2.35 million voters with disabilities would participate in elections. Time magazine noted the importance of registering people with disabilities to vote, giving special mention of AAPD’s REV UP Campaign, which ANCOR is proud to support.

As written by Time:

“However, a number of obstacles, including a lack of outreach by politicians, feelings of marginalization and difficulty navigating inaccessible polling places have historically kept disability voter turnout low. Now as the 2019 and 2020 elections approach, disability advocacy groups are tackling many of these issues and hoping to build on the energy their community has seen in the past few years to make their presence known in the next election cycle.

One of the most prominent groups doing this work is the American Association of People with Disabilities, which started its nonpartisan REV UP campaign in 2016 to promote voter turnout among people with disabilities, advocate for accessibility and educate voters about disability issues. Each year the group has organized a National Disability Voter Registration Week and it now has disability voting coalitions in 32 states around the country.

[…]

As part of their analysis, Kruse and Schur looked at states with REV UP coalitions and found a slight increase in voter turnout among people with disabilities in 2018 compared to people without disabilities in those states. Their findings come just in time for this year’s disability voter registration week, which will take place July 15 to 19 and will feature events across the country and online to ensure that people with all kinds of disabilities can participate.”