I want to make an announcement before we get started. Welcome to everyone, this is the voting as if your life depends on it voting accessibility in the age of COVID and beyond workshop. Please note this session will be recorded. We ask that all cameras be off and all mics be muted until and unless you are presenting, asking or sharing a question.
EVE HILL: I'm Eve Hill, and although I'm the moderator, I'm counting on you all the audience members to make sure I ask good questions. So I'll be watching the chat for your questions. And if I'm hoping we'll have time at the end to open up the session for questions at that time. To ask a question at that you can put it in the chat or use the "raise your hand" button. On my screen it's under reactions.
On a PC computer I understand you can hit Alt Y and on a Mac you can hit option Y. And if you want to ask your question on video, please let us know in the chat and I'm going to make that happy.
I'm going to introduce everybody. I'm going to keep it short. I'm Eve Hill. I'm a white woman with red hair, glasses, freckles that I hate. I usually say I'm wearing a black outfit because that's my uniform but I'm way out of my comfort zone. I'm a lawyer at Brown, Goldstein & Levy and I'm coming to you from my guest bedroom and I'm joined by Angie my associate who is a black cocker spaniel mix.
We call this section voting as if your life depends on it without risking your life.
Bearing in mind the importance of voting to the disability community, because elections do have consequences, what do we do when a pandemic hits and our traditional mechanisms for voting are now dangerous or even unavailable. So this panel helps to address that question. And we have a great panel today. All of whom I've had the honor and joy, quite frankly, of working with over the past year.
So over the past year I was involved on behalf of the national federation of the blind in several cases challenging inaccessible absentee voting systems in Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, the sign language interpreter has to interpret those. Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, Texas, Virginia and nonlitigated matters in Minnesota, Tennessee, Delaware, and Connecticut.
So Kristin Aiello is managing attorney with Disability Rights Maine and works in Augusta, Maine, which when I was growing up was the big city.
Christina Brandt Young works out of New York City. That's a really big city.
And Lia Sifuentes Davis is a senior litigating attorney with disability rights Texas where she leads the voting rights team there. And Kobie Flowers is my parent at Brown, Goldstein & Levy and a brilliant trial lawyer who handled our preliminary injunction action against the state of Pennsylvania over its inaccessible absentee voting system.
I want to give you a caveat that some of us won't be able to fully answer all of the questions we're going to talk about today, because some of our cases aren't quite resolved yet. We're working on it. But the cases in New York, Maine, and Virginia for example are still ongoing.
And I'm putting them on the spot in alphabetical order so I want to start with Kristin Aiello of Maine.
KRISTIN AIELLO: It's a pleasure to be here. I can't believe it in total almost 20 years. I've seen a lot of charges in the ADA over the course of that time. I've brought a voting rights case involving people with labels of mental illness back in about, I don't know, 2001. And that was my last big voting case. So it was an opportunity to bring another one in this difficult time.
So we received last June of 2020, we received calls from four voters requesting to vote by accessible absentee ballot in the pandemic. Several of them had challenged—had heard about challenges in other states. I'm sure they were once that Eve was leading and they prompted our clients to call Disability Rights Maine. One of our plaintiffs was the first blind graduate of the University of Maine school of Law. Another was known for hiking a mountain with her service dog.
Another was a professor and expert in assistive technology and the fourth was retired from a distinguished career in state government did tremendous amount of work and volunteer efforts. Three identified and blind, one identified as visually appeared. None ever missed an election. Just as an aside, I loved working with them.
The next step was for them to contact the secretary of state's office and their municipal elections clerk. I think it's from my many years of work in this area that I always want to make sure that that request is made. So each one emailed their municipal clerk and secretary of state's office and made the request and here's the answers that they got.
You could have two people you trust to assist you with completing the paper absentee ballot. If you cannot mark a paper ballot, you can use express vote system at the polling place.
Another just didn't respond.
The director of constituent services said the municipal clerk should advise you about your accessible system at your anthropology place. And that missed the point. But on and on. There were others. Other responses. But just to give you an idea, and again, underscoring how important that is, that contact where you're making that request
Three of the plaintiffs missed voting in the primary election, which, because of the pandemic, was moved to July 14th by our governor Janet Mills. And the other voted with assistance. So on July 15, 2020, we filed suit. The plaintiffs were from Augusta, Bangor, home of Stephen King, Portland and wins low. We filed a complaint for preliminary injunction alleging violations of the ADA, the Maine human rights act and section 504.
We also cited the constitution of the state of Maine which guarantees the right to a secret ballot.
We ended up adding Disability Rights Maine later as an organizational plaintiff. And I thought that we would be able to accomplish this by the individual plaintiffs, but it made me nervous when the offices of attorney general actually questioned whether or not relief would be statewide, just talking about the municipalities, the four municipalities which wouldn't cut it.
One big advantage that we had in Maine, this is legislative work that has been done in 2015, the Maine legislature passed an act to explicitly allow for the use of the Internet to provide a ballot marking system, or software that's used for voters with disabilities, uniform voters or overseas voters. So I've heard from other attorneys and other partners of the countries that they're jealous of Maine because we have that wonderful statute.
So we were able to say we want our plaintiffs to be able to receive a ballot electronically and return it electronically. So after we filed suit, I filed suit against all four municipalities, which is also a little bit different from the way other cases have been done. It's the way I did the voting rights case a billion years ago, and I thought it was important because looking at the Maine statute, it indicates the registrar of voters is the individual and municipality who runs the election.
And I thought that was important, and also of course the secretary of state needed to be named as the head of elections in Maine. So I think I might be starting to go over my time. So I'll just say that we filed—we made a request for accessible absentee ballots. Soon after we filed, the court called a meeting. The federal judge on the case was very diligent in making sure that everyone was heard. Because the issue was whether or not we're going to go forward with our motion for preliminary injunction. To make a long story short, the state created, said they wanted to do their own home grown system, which I can't even say those words without feeling the stress that I did in August. It was around September that I called Eve Hill and I said, Eve, come home. We need you. We need you in Maine. And she mercifully joined us as counsel, I think around September. Because I knew with her on our team, we would be okay.
So our plaintiffs ended up voting by the quote unquote accessible absentee ballots that were really lacking but did the trick for our plaintiffs, although they are definitely, for reasons we'll talk about later, not the preferred method of voting by absentee ballot. I'm going to stop there, even though I have more to say, and thank you.
EVE HILL: Okay. Now I'm going to call on Christina Brandt Young to talk about New York and maybe even Carol.
CHRISTINA BRANDT YOUNG: My name is Christina Brandt Young I am the managing attorney of the New York City office of Disability Rights Advocates. I'm a white woman in my mid-40s. I have a blue dress and a neck class shaped like a pinwheel.
A shot out to Lisa who litigated the North Carolina case, along with us and to Tom who is helping us litigate or maybe we're helping him litigate. We're litigating together let's put it that way in Indian. And also to Luann Blake who is objectively an expert in accessible voting and who has appeared in many court cases this year as such. I just wanted to note that they're here and they may have opinions that we would love to hear in the chat and to elevate.
I'm going to talk about briefly two cases that DRA participated in, one in New York and one in North Carolina.
The New York case was followed in late May of 2020. It was filed on behalf of the ACB of New York, the NFB of New York, the Center for Independence of the Disabled New York, Disability Rights New York, and four wonderful plaintiffs. Jose Hernandez, Keith Gurgy, Rasheda and Karen.
We filed in May and on the same day we filed a preliminary injunction for the June 21st primary. And by the 2nd of June we had a stimulation for an accessible PDF print and mail ballot that each count had to use a list of vendors in order to produce. And this was based in part on the progress that Kobie and Eve and others had made in Michigan and Pennsylvania demonstrating that such a thing was feasible and fees able pretty quickly.
Compliance with our order was frankly pretty spotty. Some counties didn't use the vendors like they were supposed to, and accordingly their ballots were terrible. And New York City ignored the order, and contracted with Democracy Live to provide online HTML ballots, and nobody told us. So I got all these calls from my clients saying I loved it. It was fantastic, it was wonderful, until I had to print it out.
We had warned people to be ready to print PDFs which are easy to move around and then Democracy Live came and nobody was ready. So we filed a second preliminary injunction in July that was asking for a complete remote accessible vote by mail tool an RAVBM for the November general election.
And our opponents made many arguments that I will not list here in order to save some time, but skimming over the top of them, essentially they argued that PDF ballots were fine, that RAVBMs were just hard for them to get up and running because they had 58 counties and they needed to certify things. They were happy to do the PDF ballots but they shouldn't have to provide accessible voting at all.
We put in declarations from the people who run the online voting tools saying these people haven't called us and their concerns are overblown.
The decisions had good parts and bad parts. The good part was the judge said that, no, you really do have to provide an accessible absentee vote. The judge said, quote, in these circumstances it would be intolerable, and legally incorrect, to conclude that the relevant service program or activity is voting generally and not absentee voting particularly. Such a definition would in effect permit the state to require persons with disabilities and only persons with disabilities, to hazard the risks of COVID 19 to cast a private ballot.
So that was a great part of the ruling. A not great part of the ruling was that the judge thought that eh, PDFs are close enough and we're equally effective to an RAVBM, which trust us, we do not agree with. So that was how people voted in November. New York was allowed to keep democracy live, so 40% of our voters did vote that way.
So that's the New York case up to November. In North Carolina, that was brought in July of 2020 by the ACB of North Carolina. Disability Rights North Carolina, Helen, Kenneth, Kendall, Ricky Scott and the governor Moorehead school alumni association.
By the time that we filed that case, the defendants were already using democracy live for overseas and military voters, which really changed the sort of whole situation of that case. The defendants were nonetheless opposed to opening Democracy Live to voters with disabilities.
They said they didn't have enough time to get it up to speed on the same day that it would go live for other voters, and they thought that electronic return was insufficiently secure. We put in an expert declaration explaining the security risks were overstated. That if all the voters with disabilities were in a single state using a single server that might present an interesting target for hackers, but that's simply not true when they're all in different places.
And the expert also noted a study saying that the defendants were overstating the importance of paper trails for election security. There was a study of an audit of an Ohio election that found that 5% or more of paper trails were unrecoverable because of paper jambs and printers running out of ink.
The court agreed with us, thank goodness, and held, quote, although defendants raised some concerns about ballot security, the court is persuaded by the plaintiff's evidence that those concerns do not outweigh the public's interest in allowing plaintiffs to vote privately and independently.
As plaintiffs correctly note, there is no method of voting that is entirely free from security concerns.
Moreover, defendants have already tested and approved the Democracy Live. The court is unpersuaded that the addition of blind voters will intolerably increase any security risk and I know I'm 13 seconds over my time but I'm God to add the last thing. The ADA does not require a mandate that certain individuals participate in public programs in a particular way.
Rather its focus is on providing reasonable accommodations so disabled individuals may fully participate should they so choose. And ultimately Democracy Live got up and running and it worked really well.
EVE HILL: Great. Now I'm going to turn it over to Lia Davis to talk about Texas.
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: Hi, everyone. I am Lia Sifuentes Davis I'm a senior litigation attorney at Disability Rights Texas and my work focuses on the ADA title 1, 2 and 3 with a votes on voting. I'm a 37 year old Latinx womb with long dark hair in my guest bedroom I do not have a dog with me. If I did, I'm sure my dog would be interested in voting.
In terms of the Texas litigation and how it arose, I'll give you background about Texas voting laws that helped put this case in context.
Texas does not have no excuse vote by mail. You have to be over 65, away from the county on election day or have a disability that prevents you from appearing at the polling place without needing assistance or injuring the voters' health. Unlike other states during the pandemic, Texas refused to expand voting by mail and in fact fought several lawsuits and those lawsuits were unsuccessful. The attempts at expansion at the fifth circuit were ultimately unsuccessful.
Nevertheless there was still a large number of voters who would have needed an accessible ballot who would also still be eligible to vote by mail under the Texas election code. So in addition to these restrictive regulations around voting by mail, there's also a bad fifth circuit case about the relationship between Texas secretary of state and counties. The case is light burn versus the county of El Paso. It's a 1997 case, and in short it says that the secretary of state does not have any responsibility to make sure counties are complying with the ADA in voting. That responsibility is entirely with the counties.
So with 254 counties in Texas, this makes statewide systemic voting issues particularly challenging to tackle. Essentially the idea would be suing 254 counties. But in our case, we have learned that the secretary of state had been telling counties and vendors that an accessible vote by mail system was illegal in Texas. Because of their affirmative comments on the issue, we decided that in spite of Lightburn, that found that secretary of state could not mandate that the county comply it could nevertheless prevent a county from complying, which is what they were doing by telling counties it was illegal for them to offer an accessible ballot to voters with disabilities.
We decided to file against the secretary of state and we first sent a demand letter to the secretary of state. This was an issue that the disability community had already been addressing with the secretary of state for several years. But obviously it was more of an urgency with the pandemic. The secretary of state was already familiar with it. And in addition, there had been a proposed legislation filed in the last legislative session about this issue and expanding voting by mail, having an accessible ballot for voting by mail, but of course that went nowhere. I'll note also that that current—in the current legislative session there is another piece of legislation about the very same thing. So far that legislation hasn't moved forward. But of course a lot of voter suppression laws that have been proposed are going forward. We've yet to see what will happen with that legislation but I'm not entirely optimistic.
We filed a lawsuit in July 2020. Which is at the same time that Maine filed their lawsuit, not on the same day, but in the same general time frame. And we asked for a preliminary injunction asking the court to tell the secretary of state to stop telling counties that they couldn't have an accessible mail in voting options. We knew some counties in Texas already had a system in place that they could have offered to voters with disabilities who needed an accessible mail in ballot. We knew if the secretary of state stopped telling counties they couldn't do it, there were counties that would be able to quickly implement it. Of course the secretary of state responded to our preliminary injunction saying this was an issue they didn't know very much about, they didn't have enough time to look at it before the election, and she would need discovery on these accessible voting systems in order to properly respond to the preliminary injunction. So the judge unfortunately did agree and we ended up having a 45 day abbreviated discovery period. And we were disappointed in that because essentially that period, though it did end before early voting started, it did bump up very close to the first day of early voting. So the judge granting that 45 day period of discovery somewhat sealed the fate of the litigation.
Of course the secretary of state also filed a motion to dismiss and after the discovery ended obviously opposed our motion for preliminary injunction. They made a couple of key arguments having to do with sovereign immunity, they cited this light burn case with some frequency. They also said that no county is trying to do it. No county had been denied the opportunity to do it. They're not stopping anyone. But even if the county tried to do it, they also said they didn't have the authority to stop the county from doing it.
Those pieces will be useful in just a moment when I talk about just a little more about what our next steps are. They also did the state law prevents this type of system from being implemented. But after all was said and done with our filings, the case was completely teed up before the start of early voting. So we could have gone forward except the judge did not rule and did not make any hint that he would be ruling on anything any time soon.
In the end we decided to file a voluntary dismissal in December 2020. Even at that point the judge had done nothing on the case. And for that reason we decided that we had what we needed to now perhaps look at a county, because the secretary of state had said in the pleadings throughout that she didn't have the authority to do anything. That she was not stopping counties from doing this. And that there was nothing she had done wrong to stop the county from implementing an accessible solution. Of course this now leaves us with the fact that no counties do have an accessible solution implemented so we will be looking at county level in terms of next steps, and when we do, we do expect there to be state intervention, if and when a judge rules that a county must implement an accessible mail in vote solution. This is really a case of both counties and a secretary of state pointing the finger at each other of which is more responsible for this. Though we also know that since we're in Texas, even if a county is eventually told that they need to do this, we expect at that point there will be state intervention.
So that's kind of where we are now. Like I said, we did file voluntary dismissal in 2020 December and now we're looking at what we can do on a county level. We knew this was going to be a long process. Litigating voting cases in Texas is generally not easy. It's with much, much jealousy and envy that I look at other states that just do something and then people want people to vote. That is not always the case that we see.
There's not a lot being done to make it easier for people to vote here in Texas, which we saw of course in other states during the pandemic. So that's where we are right now in Texas with our case. There was a lot to be learned and I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit later in the session.
EVE HILL: Last but not least, can you believe that alphabetically, the latest name in the alphabet we have is Flowers? Kobie Flowers who can talk about yet another state that didn't seem to want people to vote.
KOBIE FLOWERS: Thank you so much, Eve. As you said my name is Kobie Flowers and I'm a partner with you Eve at Brown, Goldstein & Levy. I am a Black male, 49 years old. About 5 10. I'm in a blue suit and I am speaking with everyone from my home office, at home.
So Pennsylvania. What can I tell you? I'm going to go quick. I'll see if I can get this done in less than 5 minutes. The Pennsylvania story is really a story of winning and losing, of happiness and sadness of the good and the bad. All in one story. Before I jump into the story though, I do want to say, I do want to recognize the team that really, if we did any winning, any happiness, it was because we had such a great team.
And we three parts of our team. We partnered with Disability Rights Pennsylvania and on that team we had a ton of talented lawyers. Kelly dark, Robin res nick was another, Laura Caravello was the other lawyer. With Disability Rights Pennsylvania they worked with our law firm, Brown, Goldstein & Levy, kind of classic Brown, Goldstein & Levy, the entire firm touched this case. The lead folks on the case were always Eve Hill but Sharon carver wise balm did great work
And so did my colleague Jamie straw bridge. And of course, no good voting case is done without the NFB. So they backed this up, shout out to LuAnn she obviously is just tremendous. And you can't have a case, right, unless you've got clients. And we had the best clients. Our plaintiff, we had an individual plaintiff by man by the name of Joseph Drent. And he was the vice president of NFB Pennsylvania. And so we also had an organizational plaintiff, in NFB Pennsylvania and the president there is a woman by the name of Lynn Heights who again was tremendous in helping us out with the case. So that's the team. Let's tell the story.
Pennsylvania before we got involved already had a way for people to vote by absentee and by mail. Even before the pandemic. Pandemic hits. And immediately folks like Eve kind of got the troops together and said, listen, even though Pennsylvania has a way to vote, it's not acceptable. So we filed a complaint on May 21st of 2020. And the complaint was really two parts. We had this election coming up, the primary election in June. June 2nd.
Here we are following May 21st. After the primary we obviously had the general election. So our complaint asked really for two types of relief. Preliminary injunction to go ahead and get us an accessible, although temporary way for people to vote with disabilities, and then the second part of our complaint was really asking for a permanent injunction or a permanent way for people to vote accessibly online via a ballot tool.
So the first part of the case really was a victory. We get in there May 21st, and Pennsylvania kind of immediately said hey, what do you want us to do to get this thing right? And although they didn't do exactly what we wanted them to do, because we had a good judge who was pushing us, and because of the pandemic, we at least were able to put together what was called the accessible write in ballot. So that was a PDF. That went out and people were able to vote by that PDF, folks with disabilities were able to vote by that PDF. So that was a win. We got this done, we got this done in really short order. But here's the law. This accessible write in ballot was used by—can anybody guess how many people? I'll just say sixteen people in the entire commonwealth of Pennsylvania used this accessible write in ballot that we worked so hard to get in that election. I'm talking about the primary in June. 2.8 million people voted.
But only sixteen people used this accessible write in ballot. Again I told you this case is about winning and losing. We won, yeah we got a way for folks to vote during the primary, during the pandemic. We lost, and we'll talk more about this, because not that many people used it. It was not publicized, nobody knew about it. Plus the PDF had its own internal problems. That's kind of chapter 1 of this 2 chapter story.
Chapter 2 is this. After the primary election, we then are working with Pennsylvania for them to get Democracy Live put in place. Then Pennsylvania squares we're going to get you Democracy Live, we're going to get you Democracy Live and they in fact do get Democracy Live for people to vote accessibly with an online ballot tool. A remote accessible vote by mail mechanism. So we think that's a victory.
And in fact when the judge wrote her opinion, and now we're in August of 2020, she said quote, because the plaintiffs had obtain the reliefs that they originally requested, that sounds good, for the November 2020 election, and this was key language—all subsequent elections—we got everything we wanted. This is what the judge said. We thought we were kind of winning. Then here comes, that was the win, here comes the loss.
The bad is the court finds that the plaintiffs claim, some of these issues being raised, are now moot. So ultimately what happened was Democracy Live was used. We had an RAVBM in place. But we always knew because this was the maiden voyage, because this was the first time we needed to be working hand in hand with Pennsylvania to be sure that people knew about it and that people actually trained, and there's 67 counties in Pennsylvania, we just sued the commonwealth and we're able to deal with all the 67 counties.
There's a legal strategy behind that. But point being that we had this thing in place. We didn't publicize it. It was not on social media. Nobody knew about it. And for the November 3, 2020, election, Pennsylvania had an incredible turnout. 6.9 million people voted. Do you know how many people voted using Democracy Live with all the work that we had done? 50/50.
So again, you look at that, maybe that's a loss. And it's much more of a win because now Democracy Live is in place. People like Disability Rights Pennsylvania have written a white paper explaining all the problems that went down. So now there is really kind of empirical evidence that shows now not only can this work, but here's why it doesn't work and here are the things you need to do going forward.
So that is the story of wins and losses and happiness and sadness and good and bad of Pennsylvania.
EVE HILL: Thank you, Kobie. So now I am not just the moderator. I've actually done some of these cases myself, so I want to talk a little about my cases too.
Virginia, like Texas, did not allow no excuse absentee ballots. But people with disabilities are eligible to vote absentee. And Virginia then interpreted COVID to be a health condition that you could use as a basis to vote absentee.
And the interesting thing was, Virginia already had a remote—a remote accessible vote by mail system. You'll hear us refer to RAVBMs. It's one like Democracy Live or voting works or Prime 3 or there are a few of them. Those are professional systems that provide accessible ballots.
They already had one for uniformed overseas—uniformed and overseas absentee voting act. For military voters basically and citizens who are overseas, states have to have a way to let them vote, even though they're not in the jurisdiction. So they already had a RAVBM for UOCAVA. But states did not allow it to be extended to voters with disability. We along with the Washington Disabilities sued for a preliminary injunction and a permanent injunction on behalf of the National federation of the Blind in Virginia, the American council of the blind in Virginia, and several individuals with a variety of disabilities, visual, manual, dexterity and other disabilities. And the state to their credit entered a consent decree saying they would use the RAVBM for November but they didn't have time to integrate that system into its ballot request system.
They would use it, but each time someone requested an accessible absentee ballot, the registrar would have to go through steps, entering a ticket, requesting an absentee ballot to be made, blah blah blah. Which was a struggle for the registrars. Let's just think of it as a struggle. And therefore a major struggle for people with disabilities who needed an absentee ballot.
So that's what happened in November. We the lawyers ended up being the ombudspersons between many, many voters with disabilities and the registrars and the state to get things to actually work. But then the legislature adopted legislation requiring the state to use an RAVBM for absentee voting going forward, and that is expected to go into effect in July. Now there is an election, a primary election, Virginia does its statewide elections off calendar. So this is the year when they do statewide elections. So there's a primary election in June. I'm like hm, that's before July. So we are currently working trying to work with the state to figure out how to bring this case to a full and final resolution.
And then Michigan, which I think might have been the first of these cases that I was involved in, is really why I was so enamored of these cases. We won by winning. In so many cases we lost by winning. The judge said close enough and so forth. This one we won and we won again and we won. So in Michigan we filed a primary election on behalf of the NFB of Virginia and two individuals with vision disabilities.
And reached a consent order fairly quickly under which the state agreed to purchase and implement an RAVBM for its August primary. It had pushed its primary election to August. And then they just didn't do it. And they didn't tell us they weren't doing it. So we found out very late that they were not going to do that. They were going to use the so called accessible PDFs that they had used in a May election. Again, in their August election.
And we said that's a violation of the consent decree. And that's not just going to be a problem for me, that's going to be a problem for the judge. And it was a problem for the judge, bless him. So we moved for contempt. Which is unusual. And I won't say whether that was fun or not. But that was kind of fun.
So we moved for contempt. And the judge said, defendants, I really think when you signed that consent decree, we all expected you were going to be put an RAVBM into place for the August election. I really think you should have done that. So after some really interesting discovery of people like the head of elections in Michigan, and we were about to depose the Secretary of State, we reached a settlement agreement of the consent matter, under which they would implement the RAVBM, toot suite and pay contempt damages and fees. The great thing about this in November 1, 1000, people used the accessible absentee ballot. So when you get it done early, when you actually tell people about it, and when you've got it tested and ready to go and people ask, they will use these. It is important. So 11,000 people got to vote.
Now I want to have a little bit of an interactive discussion. So you can all unmute yourselves. Just the speakers can unmute themselves. I'll ask a question and I'll call on someone. Because I'm a born teacher. I love this calling on people thing.
So I want to call on Christina for this first one. The cases of Lamone versus—who was the other side? NFB versus Lamone and Hindel versus Houston in the 6th circuit already established years ago that absentee ballot had to be accessible and the NFB wrote to every secretary of state in November of 2019 when this was no pandemic reminding them of that obligation and offering to help.
So some people might be wondering why on earth were these cases necessary?
CHRISTINA BRANDT YOUNG: I don't know what to tell you. Basically the states either didn't know or effected not to know. It's really as simple as that. In the New York case, they tried to have it both ways by saying oh, we will do accessible PDF ballots because we're so wonderful, but really judge. We don't really have to do this. Voting in person is sufficient. Which was an amazing argument to make in light of the Fourth and Sixth Circuit precedent that Eve mentions. The NFB letters made a difference. Our North Carolina judge specifically cited the NFB letters as a reason why the state had no good excuse for not making their system accessible earlier. We can stop there, but—no one knows why the state—to put it another way, the only built in enforcement mechanism in the ADA is a lawsuit, and here we are.
EVE HILL: And Michigan and Virginia are in the sixth and fourth circuits where this is—they have no basis to argue against those. And then one state that I'm not sure anybody wants me to name, recently said well, if the NFB really wanted a response, they wouldn't have sent that letter to the secretary of state. And they wouldn't have sent it by email. They would have sent it in a hard copy like delivered with someone in a fancy uniform direct to the attorney general's office. I'm like no, you keep yelling at us to try and resolve things informally and when we try, you ignore it completely.
Did others have this issue? How did you try to get away from Hindel and Limon? Others said it's not enough time.
KOBIE FLOWERS: I'll say this. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state, I guess the former secretary of state now, she actually is a voting rights lawyer. And had been working with Disability Rights Pennsylvania to get accessible voting done. So on the one hand there was a lot of talk, but there was not really action. Until the pandemic hit. But at least because there had been talk, and there were already relationships, with Disability Rights Pennsylvania particularly and the department of state, that at least allowed them, have you read this case called Limon. They knew they needed to get things done, they just weren't moving until we had to go ahead and sue them and they moved with a little bit more alacrity.
EVE HILL: Lia, in Texas states are required to have systems in place that allow military and overseas citizens to vote, even if they're not at home. So why aren't those systems accessible? Why don't states use them for voters with disabilities?
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: That's a good question and I think that we probably all have different ideas or answers about that. I think it underscores the fact that people don't think about voters with disabilities. They don't think about it when they're developing their system, because we know that even if, let's leave aside domestic accessible voting, there could be and are voters who are abroad who need an accessible ballot by mail.
Voters for disabilities abroad. These systems were not accessibility and I think it speaks to what we all see in our workday in and day out of not thinking about accessibility when developing technologies and not including it as part of the development and essentials of a system. I think some of us who do voting rights work also see this in just the voting rights community. In my work with other voting rights organizations, oftentimes disability is not necessarily thought of immediately. Or it's often overlooked. And these are of course people who are doing voting rights work, but just don't remember that these issues impact voters with disabilities, and aren't—I don't know if they don't feel knowledgeable or simply forget to include people with disabilities in their voting rights work.
So you know, why they're not already accessible? They should be. But I think it just speaks to what we all see in our work of people overlooking, ignoring. Sometimes accidentally and sometimes deliberately, the needs of people with disabilities and the law requiring equal access for people with disabilities.
EVE HILL: I remember the day, on election day, when I almost ripped my hair out after hearing all these states say oh, no, electronic return, we can't do electronic return, no way, it's not possible, too insecure, too scary. When the voters on the space station voted electronically! I'm like really? No, we can't possibly do it.
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: In Texas, we were mindful of—we weren't even asking for an electronic return because they don't do a electronic return for UOCAVA votes in Texas. We were trying something that wasn't even established under UOCAVA. I know some states did allow for electronic return. But the secretary of state wasn't buying our arguments.
EVE HILL: We might have used the military and overseas voters as allies, but honestly we were doing this so fast we didn't have time to reach out to our allies.
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: One thing I'll add to mention about this is that in our depositions with the secretary of state, one of the responses of why it was acceptable to have electronic ballots sent to overseas voters and not domestic voters with disabilities was because there was less of a chance for fraud with overseas voters than there were for people with disabilities in Texas.
EVE HILL: I never understood why that would be.
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: I present that without comment.
EVE HILL: So Kristin, let's talk about why we ended up doing these cases in this particular year. What role did the pandemic play in your cases, and how did it—was that a great way to do a case?
KRISTIN AIELLO: Well, I think it's mixed and I need to stop for a minute because I was so in a rush to talk about my case that I didn't tell you who I am. I'm Kristin Aiello. I'm an Italian American woman with well earned gray hair that's mostly brown still but I'm running out of the brown. I've got reading glasses that are rather dark, a black blazer with a jazzy flowered shirt under it because it's a rainy day in Maine and I wanted to put something a little happy on.
So yes, the pandemic. It, I guess there are pluses and minuses, if I had to say, not that there's any positive part of having a pandemic. But when it came to justifying the emergency, you couldn't get any better. I was looking at my complaint and the facts that I included were on March 15th governor Janet Mills pro claimed a state of emergency to authorize the use of emergency powers.
On April 10, 2020, Governor mills signed an executive order moving the primary from June 9th to July 14th. This extraordinary step was for purposes of planning to reduce public exposure to COVID 19. On June 3rd, Governor Mills issued another executive order allowing applications for absentee ballots to be made in writing or in person without specifying a reason. Even though both Governor Mills and the secretary of state recommended and urged Maine voters to vote by absentee ballot in order to reduce the spread of COVID 19. Secretary Dunlap said using an absentee ballot will, quote, help reduce the possibility of virus exposure for voters and election workers. The defendant, Secretary Dunlap this is before we filed suit, recommended that the safest option to return a ballot is to mail it in, not to go to the polls. Do not go to the polls. There was even talk about not having any voting at the polls at all. So we really, the public messages from the CDC, from the state government, from the Secretary of State's office, wrote themselves. I put them all in the complaint. I cited to newspaper articles. It was a dream in terms of being able to justify the emergency.
But, as Kobie indicated, there are pluses and then there are minuses. So we are building the plane as we fly it, as we talked about. And we thought going into this, we looked at some of the other pleadings, we look at some of the other affidavits, and we included PDF ballots as a potential option. We really did advocate for professional ballot system, but this was right at the beginning. We had no idea that the PDF route would be a nightmare, although I did start realizing that on July 30th when I emailed the attorney general saying I think we really should go with the professional system. By that time they had completely committed to using their own inexperienced UOCAVA vendor. And it was very, very stressful and difficult. Because we can see looking down the road that it was going to be an absolute nightmare but we had to balance what the state was doing proactively with whether or not it would prevail in advocating for a professional system.
Had we known now what we didn't know then, we would have had—we would have done what some of the other—what Christina talked about, which is, I think Christina you said, using some of the professional ballot system affidavits saying—and I even talked to Jonathan—excuse me. The head of Democracy Live, and he said oh, yeah. I know your secretary of state and your assistant secretary of state I've been talking about the system with them at different conferences.
I included the NFB letter as part of referencing the NFB, thank you NFB letter that went out to the state of Maine in 2019 as well. But it was—that was a minus to this is we have learned many, many lessons. And I loved hearing everyone speak about what they've learned, because we're all sort of figuring this out together.
We have learned in Maine, and now Maine has committed to an HTML ballot, because it was—oh, my God. It was unbelievable in August. When we were the state allowed the plaintiffs and other people we choose, and put it out there to the disability community, to test the ballots. I've never been through anything like this before.
In terms of the plaintiffs playing a role in testing ballots, because we were saying you can't do a system, you can't create a system without having users of the system test it. And so that's what happened. And it was—I'll never forget one of my plaintiffs saying when she first tested it, and I'll quote her, and this isn't ever what you want to hear from one of your plaintiffs. It was a hot mess. She ended up voting and it ended up working, but it was a hot mess in August. So there are things we've learned. I think the pandemic played a role because it really, really showed the inequity that we have in systems, including the voting system. It showed that not even in polling places, Maine's local ballots are accessible not even in voting machines. It really exposed a lot of things. But the short time frames made for situations where decisions had to be made and they were made and we're all smarter for it now.
CHRISTINA BRANDT YOUNG: I would like to pipe in on the short time frames as they relate to the pandemic. By far the most important aspect as Kristin said was to up the emergency nature of the applications, all the judges understood that. It was helpful from—it was helpful for defining the scope of the program. Because suddenly everybody was voting absentee. Governors were waiving things left and right.
And so you know, being able to say that the scope of the program is absentee voting in particular, was made much easier by that. And it really highlighted how voters without disabilities have choices. And they toggle between options based on what's best for them. Frequently, as a person—whenever I represent voters who want accessible poll sites, we're told oh, why can't you just do it absentee. And when we have people who need an accessible absentee option, we're told why can't they just go to the polling places. Having everybody take advantage of the options this year was helpful in the scope issue. It was also helpful that governors were waiving certification requirements left and right. They were waiving procurement requirements left and right. How did New York City end up with Democracy Live? No one who knows will tell me. But a lot of things happened, as Kristin said, very quickly. That might not have in a non pandemic environment.
Another sort of sad outcome, or way that the pandemic played a role in our case was that in New York we had print and mail. And as you know the pandemic affected the United States mail. And we—the messaging in New York was frequently vote in person if at all humanly possible because otherwise your vote will not count. It will not get there. And we had about 1500 New Yorkers take advantage of the accessible absentee ballot system.
And the number of people who did take their lives into their hands and voted in person anyway, is probably pretty high.
EVE HILL: The other thing I noticed was the pandemic helped in that the states would say oh, well we can't make that kind of change. And I would say you move your elections, you've changed them from in person to online, you've excused everyone from any excuse, you've changed everything about your voting, but this one you can't do? This one is beyond you? And on the procurement part people would say well, you know, we can't do an emergency procurement for this, it's not an emergency. I'm like hand sanitizer, apparently that's an emergency because you got that and didn't have to go through an RPF process, right? Do that again.
Somebody said we can't get this through the procurement process. I said how did you get hand sanitizer? And they're like oh, yes. So we learned more about people's procurement processes than I ever thought I would know.
So Kobie, we talked a little about formats here. And you had experience with all of them, lucky you. PDFs, brand new write in PDFs, HTML ballots, homegrown, and remote accessible vote by mail systems. What are the benefits and problems from those different kinds of absentee ballot formats and—and it's not even every state that has this problem. It's only the ones we could manage to get done.
KOBIE FLOWERS: I'm going to quote Kristin's client and just say it's all a hot mess. One of the reasons that I love doing this work and civil rights work is because it really helps me realize just the privilege that I have as a cis gender sighted male, and that really came out. And you look at a ballot, just as a sighted person, it's a hot mess. Now take that ballot and make it accessible for a person who's not sighted or disabled.
EVE HILL: And add ranked voting to it.
KOBIE FLOWERS: It's just a problem. And let me dig into some of the details. Okay? It's kind of a science how you create a ballot, how it looks on the page. Where are all of the elected officials going to be? For say the President of the United States, how many people are you going to put underneath the heading President of the United States? That takes a lot of thinking that before this process, with my privy didn't really appreciate.
Then once you kind of have the ballot there, making it accessible for all screen readers. That is something you need someone has the skill to do it. In Pennsylvania, surprise, surprise, they did not have someone who had the skill. They had never thought about it before, really. So taking a piece of paper, making it accessible, that's an issue.
Then if you're going to have somebody sign the ballot, and they have a disability, they're blind, that's complicated too. Because in some states it used to be this way in Pennsylvania until we litigated this, so there's a small victory here. You had to sign in a specific place. If your signature was not on the line, so to speak, that ballot got kicked. What we were able to learn is again, if you're trying to make it accessible, you've got to make it people can sign wherever on the envelope.
In Pennsylvania you've got a secrecy envelope and on top of that you've got the regular envelope to send it back to the Department of State. Just figuring that out as a blind person without using the aid of a sighted person is very, very complicated. Which ballot is which, which envelope is which? Is the secrecy ballot larger or smaller? And we learned again by using hole punches, that was one way to help distinguish the secrecy ballot from the or the secrecy envelope from the envelope that you use to send back in. So PDFs on the one hand, Adobe has a way that you can make a PDF accessible, but that's just kind of just the beginning of the process. And so let me talk about remote accessible vote by mail systems, Democracy Live basically. And let me talk about specifically what happened in Pennsylvania when we got Democracy Live up and going.
What we found out was, and this is what Disability Rights Pennsylvania has written in their white paper. What we found out is that the application process to get your RAVBM was just inaccessible. Because what happened was Pennsylvania used its own—you've heard this term before—kind of homegrown application process, instead of using the tried and tested Democracy Live application process.
And it will come as no surprise to folks gathered here today that the homegrown Pennsylvania system was just replete with problems. And one of the things I think Christina said, Kristin said this. If you don't test out whatever you're doing before you do it, again, I'm going to quote Kristin's client. It's going to be a hot mess. You've got to test. You've got to test. I don't care if it's a PDF, I don't care if it's HTML. So anyway.
There was no testing in Pennsylvania, even though we had raised our hand and said Pennsylvania, work with us. You know we need to test this out. You can't just put this out to the masses. But unfortunately because the judges said hey, the case is over, then Pennsylvania had no longer had incentive to work with the lawyers who do this stuff and the people that do this stuff.
Another—even with a kind of remote accessible ballot voting system, or remote accessible vote by mail system, RAVBM, one of the big issues is even if everything goes well, you're able to vote online and you're able to do it privately, do it independently, the question then becomes the last part of the acronym, vote by mail, how do you get it back to the state in does the person have a printer? Let's just start. Does the person have a computer let's start there.
Does the person have a computer. And again, you've got this issue in Pennsylvania of the actual secrecy envelope versus the envelope which you return it back to the state in. And then obviously we had this issue of again, being able—knowing where the person needs to sign. The actual ballot. So you're also doing two things at once too. So you've got what you're doing online. Then also you've got to get in the mail the various envelopes.
The secrecy envelope and the envelope that you ultimately use to mail it back to the state. So you've got two things happening at once. And this is assuming you get past just making a ballot in and of itself accessible. So those are some of the issues whether it's HTML, whether it's PDF, whether it's an RAVBM system that you're going to have when you're trying to figure out making these things accessible. And those are issues that we found out in real time in Pennsylvania that's what I would say is kind of the sad part of what happened there, why so few people voted successfully. The good part is now we know. The good part is now coming up, there are an election coming up in May in Pennsylvania. And the state is working with Disability Rights Pennsylvania to figure that out. Not working well. I will say. There needs to be more collaboration there. But, at least again folks know you don't want—again I go to Kristin's client's great phrase, you don't want another hot mess. Let's all work together. I've got solutions but I don't want to talk about that now. I want to defer to other folks. I know other folks have our thoughts on that. I've already said to much
EVE HILL: We've also had the issue of what I call the origami envelope they would each you an envelope you were supposed to fold into a swan in order to return your ballot back, which almost no one could do.
The one thing I would say, for those of you on this, who are defense lawyers, don't assume the plaintiffs lawyers are trying to trick or hurt you. We told every single one of them, yeah, we're not going to like the PDF ballot, but you're not going to like it either. And both New York and Maine at least said oh my God, that was a nightmare. Please don't make us do it that way again. Who made you do that in the first place? We were not trying to trick you.
And I did learn—did I learn anything about trusting—well, I guess I learned that defense counsel or defendants can learn, but they won't just take my word for it. But they did learn.
KRISTIN AIELLO: Experience is the best teacher, I suppose.
EVE HILL: That's the other thing. We also encouraged them over and over again to go talk to the last state who had done it or the neighbor states who had done it month had undoubtedly thought about all these things and tried some of them and realized oh, no, that won't work.
But one of the positions that almost every state we dealt with, except Maine, said we are the most decentralized state in the country. We are totally different from everywhere else. So I know at least New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan are in competition for being the most decentralized state in the country. And eventually we had to say, don't care.
So what is the most for each of you—what is the most important thing you learned in your case? Maybe the things we haven't talked about already. Kobie, you want to kick us off on that?
KOBIE FLOWERS: Yeah I'll kick us off and defer to everybody else. Just super quickly we've already talked about this maybe not even saying anything. The reason we didn't have as many people vote in Pennsylvania is just simple. Two reasons. Is one, there was no media campaign. There was one press release for what we did in June. Zero press release for November. Nothing on social media. You would go to their website to figure out how do I get my accessible ballot, a disaster, you had to click fifteen times to figure out what it was on the website. So again, you've got to publicize it, message it, get it out there.
And number 2, you've got to test it. The stuff is too complicated, it's too easy to mess up. Particularly when you have sighted people who are in charge. You've got to test it. Those are my two quick points. Others?
EVE HILL: Come on, ladies.
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: Mine's very straightforward and that is that starting sooner would have been helpful. And that's not just sooner at the beginning of the pandemic, but rather this is something we could have litigated in 2019, in 2018. I think we would have had the same outcome, in terms of where we are now, but having more time obviously would have been useful.
The judge in our case wasn't particularly concerned about a preliminary injunction on file, so that didn't expedite anything in our case. And neither did a pending election. So if we had been able to start sooner, things would have been resolved sooner in time for the 2020 election.
EVE HILL: Kristin, how about you?
KRISTIN AIELLO: Oh, there's a list. I would say that PDF ballots really on the whole are not effective and not worth it. I think—I really want to start thinking more about a legislative fix. I think in Maine, we do have the state crying that there's home rule and municipalities can make their own decisions and we can't do anything about it. But at the same time the secretary of state is required to provide a voting system that is accessible overall.
So there are just so many issues there that I think talking with legislators to say here's the reality here. People who are serving overseas in the military, and people with disabilities, do not have the equal rights to vote in Maine. There are no accessible local ballots right now. And just because you may have a disability or you may be a service member serving your country, certainly doesn't mean you should be disenfranchised. These are the most basic civil rights and to think that people are disenfranchised like that is something that I think—there needs to be more outreach. People need to know. So doing a public campaign, doing a campaign to be a better ally, if you're not a person with a disability. Use voting machines. Because right now, people in municipalities think it's not a problem. I used the voting machine in my own city and I was given a local ballot that didn't work in the voting machine.
And I was told by the clerk that oh, people with disabilities like to work at home. My eyes bugged out of my head and said you don't actually know who you're talking to right now. But being a better ally and doing a better public campaign and saying everyone should use voting machines because it makes it more private for people with disabilities who use them and it also makes it more crucial and it's more fair, I would echo what others have said about testing.
And people with disabilities who are users of the system, leading the way. That's what my plaintiffs did. They were the reason why the PDF ballots worked at all. Because they were in there testing those ballots. Not people who were sighted, not vendors, they're not users of the system.
And also something that I've also practiced for more than 20 years, which is making sure that there's a trail, an electronic trail, a paper trail, whatever trail you want, of making those requests. Individuals advising them to reach out to their municipality, to their state, and not just filing if you can help it, without having that contact made first. Because it's all the more compelling to have those requests made and it's more—it makes the claim more viable in the end.
I think that's it for now. But a lot of lessons learned.
EVE HILL: Christina, how about you?
CHRISTINA BRANDT YOUNG: I'm sorry I'm going to be the last one of us—Eve you'll be the one to close this out.
Do everything within your power to get a judge who's willing to tell a government what to do. What's the single biggest difference between my cases? That would be it.
Another thought is how tech phobic the underlying state election apparatus is just a huge predictor of how your case is going to go. And New York, for instance, had to be sued by the Department of Justice to bring in that complaint with the Help America Vote Act. It's always been very tech phobic. The move act is those uniformed and overseas voters, it requires states to deliver ballots by email. It doesn't require the states to take them back by email or fax. Only mail is an option. And probably that underlying question of does your state accept those back from UOCAVA voters might be an interesting predictor for how the rest of your case might go in this way.
I also wanted to take a moment to sort of shout out the communication and cooperation between the different plaintiffs in the different states in this particular area, in this particular pandemic. I got to participate in three preliminary injunctions on this topic. And every time I got to do one, we were able to list dear sweet judge, Michigan got this up and going in 14 days. So this state can do it too. Every time I did a preliminary injunction, there were more orders, more states.
It was a really rewarding process to participate in in that way. Because we all got together and shared information. And so shout out to everybody who participated in one of these cases. It was a wave, and it was a really great wave to participate in.
EVE HILL: I would reiterate the just fantasticness of the plaintiffs at least in every case I worked with. They were on it, they had vision, they were clear they were so great. They would talk to the press, they would talk to the court, they would talk to everybody and they were just fantastic. And I do not think this is an unusual thing in our community. And so putting them out front every time made me feel so safe. And so ready to follow after them and say yeah what she said. And this is the law that says what she said is right. And it was just brilliant.
One other thing I would say is the other side's messaging—
KOBIE FLOWERS: Before you say your other thing, let me add because I think it's important here about our clients. As you know, Eve, in Pennsylvania, our clients actually testify before the judge. And it was not only what they said, but it was how they said it, and how they told their story. And here we have a Trump appointed judge who got it and was not going to play games. I think that's in large part because of our clients. Forgive me for cutting you off.
EVE HILL: That's right. And we appeared before all kinds of judges. And two a one the judges started out saying called us in a status conference said state what the bleep are you doing. Every single judge, no matter who appointed them, no matter what their reputation said you've got to be kidding me. Whether they would go all the way for the remedy was another story. Their initial was I get this, you can't get this, what are you doing. That was great.
The other thing was, everything we do in the disability community is surrounded by messaging context that's taken as truth that may or may not have anything to do with us. And so I got thrown at me in every single case the quote, MIT study on the insecurity of accessible—of electronic voting. And I would have to say huh, what MIT study? Is that the one by the guy from the University of Michigan who happened to use a research associate who was at MIT?
That doesn't make it an MIT study. But the press loved that issue, loved it. Covered it to death. And pushing back on a outside milieu of something is terrifying and awful is very hard. So we've got to step up our messaging.
Okay. So we're getting near the end. Oh, my goodness. I wanted to ask you very quickly what's the future for accessible voting? What remains to be done?
LIA SIFUENTES DAVIS: I'll say briefly in Texas right now, we, like I talked about, will be looking at moving towards county, trying to do county intervention. But more specifically, Texas is facing a lot of new voting laws that are going to have a very bad impact on people with their disabilities in the past. They're all bad but one of them is a person with disability this they want to vote by mail, they need to have a letter from their physician documenting that they are allowed to vote by mail under the requirement. In addition for curb side voting, only one voter per vehicle, and the driver has to exit the vehicle while the voter is voting. So this means somebody who perhaps takes a rideshare or paratransit, that driver for the ride share or paratransit is going to have to exit the vehicle. And the driver is supposed to sign, testifying to the fact that the person with the disability who's voting is eligible to vote by curbside.
In addition they are saying that you can record people who are receiving assistant both audio and visual recording. People receiving assistance during the process at the polling site, and those are just the worst ones. There are others that are very awful for people with disabilities. And I know that unfortunately we're not optimistic about our chances of stopping these bills. So that's something that voting rights folks here in Texas are going to be looking at.
EVE HILL: Well that depressed me. I would throw in my pitch. I think the next wave is electronic return. Some states are already doing it. It can be done. It can be secure. It is no less secure than electronic return for voters who are in the military or overseas. And honestly, I find it incredibly ironic that we require blind people to buy printers to accommodate us.
All right. Do we want to open it up for questions? A couple of comments in the chat. Pointing us to the Rutgers study with the elections assistant commission that talked about how people with disabilities are voting more and more and yet still facing barriers.
KOBIE FLOWERS: Our colleague Jessie makes a really good point. Because in Pennsylvania we brought the case in May. It had an RAVBM in place by October. Five months. And we had been, needless to say, folks far more talented than me had been trying to get this done and they did it in five months.
KRISTIN AIELLO: I think that there should be more room for everyone to use voting machines in polling places and for HTML ballots to be returnable electronically like we do in Maine. That's my hope. I did find the news from Texas depressing and I'm sorry to hear it.
EVE HILL: And our firm along with the NFB is actually suing Maryland over that. The fact that often the only person to have used the accessible voting machine in a polling place will be the blind guy. So everybody knows, hey, we know how he voted. It's a problem.
KRISTIN AIELLO: And it creates a culture in small towns, big cities, everywhere. Where the voting machine is collecting dust. Because people aren't welcome in there and when they do come to use it and the clerks don't know how to operate it so it becomes a hot mess. Thank you to my client. She has words for everything.
KOBIE FLOWERS: The judge in Pennsylvania was Jennifer P. Wilson. I will also add to each point about electronic return. I do think that's the way to go. I've talked about this, we've litigated this issue. We file our taxes electronically. We do banking electronically. We shop electronically. As Eve said, certain states do UOCAVA returns electronically. It really makes no sense why we can't do voting electronically and this whole idea of it's so scary, I really do think is a I suggest as far as the next litigation we go to the next state that has UOCAVA E return and litigate that's the place where we should start doing—
EVE HILL: What a good idea.
KOBIE FLOWERS: I give Eve and Jessie and Sharon and everybody else in our firm, we've been talking about that. I think that's the next move. So building off again what Eve and Christina and Kristin you guys have done around the country. That's the next move.
EVE HILL: We did just get a couple of questions. Are we in Georgia yet? I have not been in Georgia yet. I haven't talked to the advocacy office about whether they're doing anything in Georgia yet. And wanted to know in the cases that we didn't sue.
For me those were Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, and somewhere else. And in Connecticut I think we're not done talking to them. Tennessee said oh, my goodness, let's figure out something, and did. And Minnesota said oh, they were the ones I said how did you get hand sanitizer and they said oh, let us use the hand sanitizer thing and they went on and contracted with an RAVBM.
So different you know, the proper response can get us to go away. The improper response could get us to live with you forever.
And Carly said she got to use an absentee ballot in Maryland in the primary last year and was so grateful to have that option. I would say I got so many calls not just from plaintiffs, but from others, who got to use the accessible absentee voting for the first time. Many of them were choked up about it. And I was choked up about it too. Because the fact that we've denied people access to this most fundamental right of the foundations of how our government works, when the solutions are there, was really sad. And having a tiny role in getting those solutions implemented and making a difference, really is just the highlight of my career.
KRISTIN AIELLO: The way we've argued, with our settlement, potential settlement with the state is print disabilities. So we had someone call us who has MS who said I was able to vote on my own for the first time. I didn't need assistance and it was the same sort of moment I had as Eve.
EVE HILL: All right. So I think we can finish up with 1 minute left. What we say is the best way to explain why an RAVBM better, less than a hot mess of an accessible PDF. We have the answer for that.
The RAVBMs are already tested, using the full variety of assistive technology, web browsers, and what are Microsoft Word and other—the full range of the three types of technology you need to use in order to be able to use any kind of accessible document. So what we found in Michigan is in their first round, this was in May, they went with a, quote, accessible PDF, and it would not work with Voiceover on Apple at all.
So the RAVBMs are already tested so that they work with the major assistive technologies. So they work with Chrome and Firefox and probably maybe even Internet Explorer I don't know. They work across the different types of platforms and across the different types of technologies.
KOBIE FLOWERS: The only thing I would add, Eve, is that the RAVBMs are one step closer to—electronic return.
EVE HILL: The other thing about RAVBMs is they're not a request and then request a ballot system. They load the ballot information up in advance, put it in the accessible ballot, and it's ready to go. There's no delay, there's no extra steps. The person requests an absentee ballot, they get an absentee ballot.
CHRISTINA BRANDT YOUNG: I have another answer to this question which is a ballot is a wildly complex document as Kobie already mentioned. The number of races, the number of options, how they're laid out on the page. In New York we have something they call a whole face balance which means every single race has to fit on to a single page.
It's wildly complicated. An RAVBM makes things less complicated by having just one race per HTML page.
And if you don't fill out that race correctly, it can give you a little alarm saying hey, you voted for too many candidates or you didn't vote for enough candidates. And by breaking a complex document into a single HTML page per race, and by having those alerts when you fill it out wrong, the RAVBM gives you a much better chance of filling out that ballot accurately.
There is an argument that every absentee ballot should be an HTML ballot, because there's a better chance it will be voted correctly.
EVE HILL: All right. We have to wrap up now. Thank you all so much for coming. I was really afraid everyone would go to Dan Goldstein's session. Thank you all. Thank you to our panelists and have a great rest of the symposium.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks everybody.