Vote for Access

Rebecca talks to Imani Barbarin about Vote For Access, a new online TV series on the barriers to voting for people with disabilities. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

In the 2016 election, nearly three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, over 80 percent of U.S. polling places remained inaccessible to voters with disabilities. Meanwhile, if people with disabilities voted at the same rates as nondisabled voters, more than 2 million additional votes would be cast in 2020. And, as a new online TV show called “Vote for Access” explores in a 5-episode series released this week, lack of accessibility at the ballot box is just part of the picture. Rebecca sat down with Imani Barbarin, the series’ host and director of communications and outreach at Disability Rights Pennsylvania, for a sneak peek and a look at the story behind the show.

This episode’s guest:

• Imani Barbarin, director of communications and outreach, Disability Rights Pennsylvania (@imani_barbarin)

For more:

• Watch the series and learn more about the issues at VoteForAccess.us
• Check out Rooted in Rights’ other video projects like Bottom Dollar

TRANSCRIPT:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

In the 2016 election, nearly three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, was signed into law, over 80 percent of U.S. polling places remain inaccessible to voters with disabilities. Meanwhile, if people with disabilities voted at the same rates as non-disabled voters, more than 2 million additional votes would be cast in 2020. And as a new online TV series called Vote for Access explores in a 5 episode series released earlier this week, lack of accessibility at the ballot box for people with disabilities is just part of the picture. I sat down with the Imani Barbarin, the series host and director of communications and outreach at Disability Rights Pennsylvania, for a sneak peek and look at the story behind the show, which is more timely than ever in this moment of COVID-19. Let’s take a listen.

Imani, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. And it’s a real pleasure to finally have you on after talking with you for a while about doing this. I’m glad we’re finally doing it!

IMANI BARBARIN: Me too! It’s been like a year. I think the last time I saw you in person was at Netroots Nation last year, and I’ve been missing you ever since. And I feel like this is the perfect opportunity to be talking to you.

VALLAS: I know. We need to either be sitting like with some coffee or some wine or some something for this. But I’ve been excited for it. But the impetus for finally having you on the show — there’s a lot of things we could be talking about in this moment or generally — but you have a really, really exciting new project that is just launching actually this week. And I was getting to have sort of a sneak peek of it. It’s really, really exciting. It has to do with sort of democratic participation by people with disabilities voting, namely. Talk a little bit about Vote for Access, this new series that you just launched. What’s the story behind it? What’s going on with this new project? Tell us about it.

BARBARIN: Oh, absolutely. So, last year, I was approached by Block by Block Creative and Rooted In Rights and other protection and advocacy agencies because we were really focused on the 2020 election, and we really wanted to jump some of the voter participation from people with disabilities in election 2020. And we feel like there are so many different aspects to voting and accessibility that often go unaddressed that we really wanted to cover in this series. And the Protection Advocacy Network is uniquely suited to tackle some of these issues because we’re federally funded to ensure voting access in your states, nationwide. So, we really wanted to kind of embolden some of the advocacy that we’ve been doing, as well as highlight some of the experiences of people with disabilities and tell their stories. I think it’s important to match —

VALLAS: Imani, let me jump in, just in case people don’t know what protection and advocacy groups are.

BARBARIN: Oh, sure.

VALLAS: Some people [inaudible]. Probably worth explaining what are P and As? What’s the Protection and Advocacy Network? Voting is part of it. But maybe talk a little bit about P and As before we get into it.

BARBARIN: Oh, absolutely. So, protection and advocacy agencies, or P and As, are federally-mandated agencies to protect against the abuse and neglect of people with disabilities nationwide. And so, they do tons of advocacy in regards to voting, in regards to you’ve probably seen a lot of medical rationing talks. So, they file lawsuits on behalf of the disability community to protect us from abuse and neglect. And I became associated with them at the end of 2018, and I’ve been working with them ever since. So, that’s kind of a very short explanation of what they do. But they do a lot of work, and they do some individual advocacy with people with disabilities who are coming across issues in their everyday life.

VALLAS: Yeah, super important and just hugely, hugely vital part of kind of the backbone of both the disability rights and enforcement kind of infrastructure as well as direct service provision and so much more. So, didn’t mean to interrupt you, but just helpful to have that context before you kind of explain why P and As wanted to work with you on this project.

BARBARIN: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so, I always forget because I’m always just so excited to get into it, that I forget some people are just unfamiliar with the network as a whole. But yeah, we are in every single state, and there is a nationwide organization. Indigenous people have their own agency as well, as well as some territories. So, yeah, absolutely.

VALLAS: So, they approached you, and the idea was to try to increase voting by people with disabilities in 2020. So, pick up there before I interrupted you.

BARBARIN: No, it’s fine. It’s fine. So, one of the statistics that we found out is that in the 20-I’m going to say-16 election, about 80 percent of polling places were inaccessible to people with disabilities, 60 to 70 percent officially. And that’s unacceptable, you know. And these problems ranged from machines not being plugged in to training issues to machines not being able to be, your vote not being able to be verified if you’re a blind person or have trouble seeing, just a whole range of issues. And then we found out also that if people with disabilities voted at the same rate as those without, 2.3 million more people would vote. I mean, think about how elections are swung. There are elections that are decided based off of a handful of votes. What if 2.3 million more people voted? So, we really wanted to encourage people with disabilities to vote. We wanted to make sure that people felt like their stories were being heard and validated. And we wanted to speak with the community about what it’s like as a citizen who feels that they are disconnected and disenfranchised from the right to vote.

VALLAS: And so, the idea was that instead of kind of just publishing some papers or maybe doing a bunch of sign-on letters, that you guys were going to team up to actually produce a television series. And that’s what you done, and it’s called Vote for Access. So, talk a little bit about the series. And I mentioned it’s launching this week. So, people are actually, once they listen going to be able to watch it.

BARBARIN: Yeah! So, Vote for Access, basically, there are five episodes, and they all cover a different aspect to voting and a different barrier to voting. So, that could be anything from attitudes to information to physical access at the polls, alternatives to the polls — things that we are trying to develop as a society to make voting easier — as well as voter suppression, which you know, has been a very hot button issue and is very prevalent with the disability community and the black community and how those two things are interwoven. So, we really wanted to address all of these different perspectives to end barriers to voting to make people feel like they had a little bit of an understanding as to why the statistic is so high as to inaccessible polling places.

VALLAS: Yeah. And so, the stat, again, that you mentioned — and I feel like it always bears repeating because it is incredibly, incredibly shocking, but also something that almost no one knows. So, I feel like every time you say it, jaws hit the floor and they go, “Oh my god. I had no idea” — but it’s that over 80 percent of polls were not accessible to voters with disabilities in the 2016 election. It’s something that we have heard some level of discussion about for the first time in this year’s presidential primary. It has started to become an issue that’s received a little bit more attention in recent months as a result. But one of the things that I actually found interesting, getting to get a sneak peek of the series that you guys are launching this week — and you said it’s in five parts, and each of those different episodes is going to be released. People will get to explore all the different facets of the issue — part of what I was really interested in was, you know, I came in kind of knowing that 80 percent polls inaccessibility stat. And so, my assumption was that, oh, that’s probably going to be what this series really kind of focuses on is what are the barriers to voting that are kind of accessibility-related?

But the series makes very clear, and the way that you have structured it makes very clear, that actual inaccessibility at the ballot box is really just one part of what’s going on here and that it’s a much more complex and multifaceted kind of societal, cultural. There’s so many different factors going on. I’d love to actually walk through several of those different factors with you, in part because some of them are probably ones that people might not even be thinking about are really kind of at the heart, you argue, of what’s going on here. The series starts with the issue of attitudes. Talk a little bit about attitudes. And I’m not asking you to scoop too much of what’s in the series, but just give us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch.

BARBARIN: Oh, absolutely. So, fundamentally, with people with disabilities, disabled folk, there seems to be the idea that we don’t want to participate in society, or we have no reason to participate in voting or anything like this. And so, are attitudes that keep people at the polls that it could mean that people don’t see any point to setting up a voting machine that’s accessible. It could mean that people in disabled people’s lives don’t really want to explain voting options or explain the candidates or things like that or help accommodate some of those informational understandings. It could even be presidential candidates or political candidates not even thinking of trying to listen to the disability community. So, there’s a whole wide range of attitudes that make disabled people feel like we’re not even citizens or that we’re not even a part of this nation or a part of this political process. And we spoke with people with disabilities in the series who’d said that people’s attitudes did keep them from the right to vote, or they had the idea that they weren’t allowed to vote as a person with a disability, which is absurd!

And we’re watching some of these attitudes play out nationwide right now as it relates to the current crisis that we’re in. These attitudes that we believe that people with disabilities aren’t really a part of society, and so what does it matter that we participate?

VALLAS: And is there an aspect of that, like to the what does it matter perspective, is there an aspect of that that’s, you know, even if I vote, what difference does it make? Because I feel like I’m not hearing myself or the issues that I need raised by any of the candidates. And maybe that’s starting to change in this particular primary cycle, in this particular election cycle, because finally, people with disabilities have really been at the table with a range of the candidates, at least on the Democratic side. But is that part of what you heard as well in kind of asking the question, well, what does it matter anyway?

BARBARIN: I think that because we’re speaking with so many advocates, they all wanted to participate, and they all wanted to be a part of the political process. But I do hear it from a lot of people online through my other work building communities online with people with disabilities. And I feel like there’s a feeling of uselessness when we go to the ballot box and vote. But even when somebody’s not listening, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak or you shouldn’t have your voice heard. We should vote because it matters. We should vote because even if we feel like it’s not going anywhere, we had a say. We exercised our right to vote. So, I think there’s a level of futility people are feeling with going to the ballot box. But it still matters, and having your voice heard still matters.

VALLAS: You mentioned that another thing that you heard that maybe is incredibly — actually it’s incredibly — shocking as I’m hearing it, but as it seems to have been to you, but seems to be somewhat pervasive even today is sort of lack of information about people’s right to vote. And so, people thinking that they’re actually not eligible because of their disability or other reasons. Information itself is actually a whole other episode of this series and seems to be a big part of what’s going on as well.

BARBARIN: Oh, yes. Absolutely. There was a report put out during 2019 that not a single candidate’s website was accessible to people with disabilities. And that’s shocking, because if you’re a candidate, your thought process should be nobody should be filtering my message for other people. And so, if your message is being filtered through other individuals, it’s getting muddied, and so you’re no longer having that unique connection with a potential voter. And so, information is always an issue whether or not it’s candidates expressing their platforms to people with disabilities or it is voting information that is not accessible, voting election sites that are not accessible to disabled folk, the application process. I mean, there’s any number of steps that needs to be accessible that may or may not be. And that communication with the disability community is really a large factor in disenfranchisement and a reason why people with disabilities feel like they don’t matter in this process.

VALLAS: And then that also really connects. Because it’s another kind of aspect of accessibility right, when you think about polling places being accessible, there’s also accessibility of information itself so that people can be informed voters. I want to give a shout-out in this context to a particular online community that’s been incredibly important in this context and has been around for a number of years now. That’s #CripTheVote.

BARBARIN: Yay!

VALLAS: Alice Wong, [inaudible], all of those amazing folks doing just really, really terrific work to really create a community that itself starts to sort of circumvent some of these barriers that you’re mentioning by providing and collating information for people with disabilities about, say, the candidates or about how to vote or hosting online conversations about issues with a disability lens, with prominent people, all those kinds of really important contributions to the conversation, but very much in reflection to the barriers that you’re that you’re mentioning.

I want to also go to voter suppression, because that’s a whole episode as well of this series. And you mentioned it in kind of explaining some of the more nefarious barriers and more intentional barriers that exist out there alongside some that may persist because of neglect or lack of information or lack of political will. And I want to come back to the accessibility piece as well. But get into voter suppression and how that plays out for voters with disabilities.

BARBARIN: Yeah. So, it’s very frightening. You know, one of the things that you learn as a part of the disability community is just how diverse and how wide it is. And so, voter suppression is such a huge, huge issue. And we talk a little bit about in the series. We touch upon the elections in Georgia and some of the methods that were used there using the disability community. And first and foremost, I must say neglect of accessibility, of making polling places less available to people, that is voter suppression. Neglect is voter suppression. And so, I kind of want people to get out of the mindset that because somebody overlooked something, there was no intent behind it. It really doesn’t matter what the intent was if people are getting their vote suppressed. And we talked a little bit with Curtis Hill because he does outreach with black communities in voting and disability. And in the disability community, we are often seen as only disability. But we really need to start thinking of it holistically.

In the Georgia election, I want to say in 2018, they used the Americans with Disabilities Act to shut down polling places in primarily black and brown neighborhoods. And if we think back to the earlier statistic of 80 percent of polling places that are inaccessible, that would mean that they’re picking and choosing polling places to shut down on the basis of who lives in those areas. And disabled people do not want to be thought of as a pawn to suppress the votes of other minorities. And so, when we think about voter suppression, we think about these larger examples. But the fact is that we have let polling places become so inaccessible that they can now be used as tools for suppressing other people, which is a huge problem. And it also affects people with disabilities who are also people of color.

VALLAS: And just to unpack that point, right, because people might be hearing this and going, wait a second. How could the Americans with Disabilities Act be used as a tool to suppress the vote? Isn’t it a civil rights law? Isn’t it something that’s actually supposed to protect the rights of people with disabilities? We should probably unpack a little bit of what happened back in 2018 in Georgia. Because this did get some attention at the time, but it is actually really worth understanding. If I recall correctly — help me kind of piece the details back together — what happened was there were, I think, nine, seven or eight or nine polling places that ended up getting closed because policymakers there kind of looked at the polling places and said, “Oh! These aren’t compliant with the ADA.” But it was this enforcement that had jumped in not to make the polling places accessible, which obviously would be the right thing to do so that everybody could vote, but rather to say, therefore, these polling places can’t be used at all. And as you said, they happened to be in majority black districts.

BARBARIN: Yeah, and that’s part of the issue, is that we need to come together, the disability communities come together, with the black community and black civil rights leaders to say that we are not for this. And to their credit, a lot of disability organizations did just that, including the National Disability Rights Network. And so, we really need to think of voting as a multi-dimensional issue. And if we let polling places remain inaccessible, this is an exercise that can repeat itself in future elections. And so, this is a huge problem. But now, because people are sitting at home, people are socially distancing or physically distancing, we’re thinking about making polling more accessible, which, you know, it’s touch and go with the disability community because we’ve been fighting for this for a long time. But only when non-disabled people are inconvenienced or feel like they’re met with inaccessibility, now we see these things moving forward. But they still need to be accessible. And so, we don’t often think of accessibility as sensory issues or informational issues or intellectual or developmental disability issues. We really need to start thinking about it as all of these different perspectives to disability that need to have voting accessibility made apparent to them.

VALLAS: So, just to sort of cut to the overall kind of backdrop of this series and kind of the point that it’s sort of making, it’s not just to educate people for the sake of people being educated, right? You’re clearly trying to drive an impact and change here, which is increased voter participation by people with disabilities. What are the consequences of low levels of voter participation by the disability community? And I ask that question in large part, really, obviously thinking about this particular COVID-19 moment, which is laying bare so many ways that our public policy landscape is incredibly broken and was broken long before this pandemic. People with disabilities are among those who are really paying some of the greatest costs as a result. And it strikes me that while you were planning this series, long before we knew what COVID-19 was or was going to be, that it couldn’t really be more timely. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about kind of how you see the consequences of low levels of voter participation by people with disabilities tying into what we see in this COVID moment and what it reveals about those kinds of consequences.

BARBARIN: I think one of the consequences of not having as many disabled folk voting as possible, it’s just that nobody really pays attention to the issues that we need to address. We’re looking at this now from a COVID-19 lens. But even before, we were still warehousing human beings in institutional settings and nursing homes. We are talking about lack of access to PPE. You know, our direct care workers are not paid what they should be. And I really want to talk again about the intersection of disability and civil rights and particularly black rights and black and brown rights. We’re watching as direct care staff are falling ill with COVID-19, And they are predominantly black and brown people. And so, what that means is that if black and brown people are not getting the care that they need to protect themselves from COVID-19, that directly affects the disability community. And when we think about the disability community, we think of people that want to speak for us or speak at us, but they should be talking with us. And when we make voting so difficult that people feel like they are not heard, that they are not listened to, they feel like they’re not valued. They feel like they’re not citizens. They feel like they’re not participants in society along with the rest of us. And even myself, I feel like our issues are not pinpointed as bigger issues on national platforms. And to their credit, CripTheVote has really forced a lot of candidates to say that we’re here. We are a quarter of the population. We should not be ignored like this year in and year out.

But I do think that we are kind of coming out more in terms of voter participation. We are making herself apparent. We’re taking politicians to task. We’re making sure that we’re no longer ignored. But in this particular COVID-19, moment it feels like everything is on fire, and everything feels like it’s an urgent matter because it is. But we should’ve been fighting for these things a long time ago. We should’ve been voting on these issues years, years back. So, yeah, I think that it makes…. I think a lack of voter participation gives politicians an excuse to say that our issues are not real issues.

VALLAS: What are some of the policy changes that you would hope to see? And I’ll make this kind of a two part question, because the series isn’t just one that tees up broken policies. I’m also curious to hear you talk about the attitude and culture changes that we need to see to see that $2.3 million vote gap get closed.

BARBARIN: Yeah, I think that we really need to focus on voter accessibility. I really want to see not just accessibility in a physical sense. You know, we’re talking a lot about mail-in ballots with COVID-19 and the upcoming election. But accessibility is not just proximity to the things that you need. It’s also sensory disabilities that need access to information and to private and independent voting. And so, I really hope that we, I would love personally to see an electronic ballot or a digital ballot or something like that where accessibility can kind of be built into the system from the ground up. Mail-in ballots are great, but they leave out the blind and low vision community. So, I really hope that we think of voting as a issue to be addressed holistically.

And I think policy wise, I would hope that politicians are really listening to disabled folk and really engaging the community in anything that they do from here on out. There’s no excuse anymore. It’s not like we can say that people with disabilities are fighting on capitol steps to be heard or easily have the door shut on them. We are online. We are in every single space that you inhabit. So, I would encourage people to speak with the people with disabilities in their lives to hear what we really care about and what issues really speak to us. Yeah.

VALLAS: And also just to push on kind of the attitudinal or the cultural side of this as well. I mean, is this COVID moment one that you see as likely to spur the disability community to say, wow, I need to vote. I can’t not vote in November. My my life and so many other people’s lives are literally on the line in this moment. Or do you see it going the other way, that everything starts to feel hopeless and it doesn’t make a difference? And what’s the point? I know which one I hope is the answer, but I’m really curious kind of what you’re hearing and how you feel these next several months might go in terms of what direction it could push people.

BARBARIN: Well, I feel like from the disability community, at least the disability community which I inhabit, there’s never been a question about whether voting has been important. It’s always been the attention of non-disabled people that we need to pay attention to these issues. And so, when we talk about this series, we really want people with disabilities to vote more. We want people with disabilities to engage their local politicians and national politicians. But also, we really want non-disabled people to say, oh, I had no idea this was an issue. Let me work on creating a space where people with disabilities can have their viewpoints heard by politicians. Because, to be honest, a lot of disabled people know the facts. We know the issues. We know what we want to vote on, what we’re passionate about. But I feel like, in a certain sense, we need non-disabled people to quote-unquote “cosign” it in order for people to pay attention to it. So, I really hope people with disabilities increase their rates of voting. And I hope that these mail at home efforts drive up disabled participation in the next election. But in reality, I think what we need is everybody to pay attention to these issues and say that accessibility is no longer optional.

We’re living in a COVID-19 moment in which non-disabled people are taking advantage of the accessibility features that disabled people have fought for, for years, and voting is something that we really want people to take from us! We really want voting to be accessible to everybody who wants to vote, and we want to increase the numbers drastically across the board. So, I think that it’s really an issue of making sure that there’s a cultivated space to have these discussions and to have people pay attention, so that everybody can call their local politicians and say, “You need to make this polling place accessible now. You need to make sure that all of your information is accessible now.” Because it is unacceptable for these tools to not be available to everybody because everybody should be treated as a participant in this society.

VALLAS: Imani, we’ve been talking a little bit about kind of the individual segments of the series, and I don’t want to do much more of that because I want people to go watch it. And I’d love for you to actually kind of mention though just some of the people that you spoke with for the series. Because I feel like they’re definitely some kind of names that are worth checking and some shout-outs that definitely deserve to be made and some really incredible people that you spoke with throughout all the different parts of this.

BARBARIN: Oh, yeah. You know, I really loved speaking with Eric Patrick Thomas. He was awesome to talk to. And he went viral, I think, in I want to say 2016 for finally getting the ability to vote after 20 years! I mean, think about that. You are trying to vote for almost 20 years. Every single election, you’re trying to get to the ballot, and only the year of this major election are you able to cast your ballot. And sometimes he went, and the machine wasn’t plugged in or people didn’t know how to turn it on and stuff like that. So, I was really just incredibly in awe of his persistence. Because I feel like after five years, I would give up, personally.

VALLAS: [laughs]

BARBARIN: I would be like, you know what? I’m done, you know. I’ve exercised this right for five years. I’ve been trying to exercise this right for five years. I’m over it! I’m good. But he really kept at it and was like, I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to give up my voice, and I want to participate. And I want to vote. As is his right.

VALLAS: Yeah, it’s an incredible story. I love you saying at five years, that would’ve been your cut off. You’re like, “Five years!” [laughs]

BARBARIN: No, I would’ve looked at it. I would’ve been like, “You didn’t set it up again? Really? You know what? Nevermind.”

VALLAS: [laughs] [inaudible] all of that. I mean, it’s just, it is truly incredible. But it’s also it’s like, it’s the stories that need to be told, right? Because I don’t think, as you said, a huge audience for this, I was hoping and assuming must be non-disabled people who have no clue that any of this is an issue and who need to have their eyes opened. I love how you put it, and I think it’s sort of an indictment of our politics, but also probably an accurate statement at this point to say that the sort of co-sign from non-disabled people is part of what elevates the disability agenda to that main stage, which is part of where some of those candidates in this particular year who I will not name and can’t name on this show did so much in moving the ball forward by putting seats at the table for people with disabilities to shape their agendas.

BARBARIN: Yeah, and I think that’s a pervasive theme that we talk about, too, is this paternalism of people with disabilities feeling like somebody above them should be determining whether or not they have the right to vote, which is true in a lot of cases. Our government does that. But the sense that disabled people are not really believed in and of ourselves. And I think that’s an issue across the board for disability rights and justice issues. And I think this series is really powerful in that it gives people with disabilities and advocates the ability to say, “I’m here. I’m talking about this issue as myself, and I want you to pay attention.”

VALLAS: We’ve been talking about people with disabilities as voters. And I recognize this is not the focus of this series, but it just it screams out to me as kind of a related and kind of additional side of the coin here. And that’s disabled people as candidates running for office and [inaudible] elected office, so that no longer is it just about trying to influence people in power through a voting bloc that’s undervalued drastically in this moment. One in four bears repeating as many times as we can possibly squeeze it into this conversation today.

BARBARIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: But disabled people as candidates, talk a little bit about how that fits into what we need to have happen for true democratic participation and representation by disabled people.

BARBARIN: You know, I really want people with disabilities to run for office. I always try to, I always tease my followers because they’re constantly asking me to run for office, and I flat out refuse 9 times out of 10.

VALLAS: Nine times? That leaves one time. Are you saying there’s a chance?

BARBARIN: Like… No.

VALLAS: [laughs]

BARBARIN: I don’t know. I think it about every so often, and then I look at the world. I’m like, maybe, maybe…never.

VALLAS: [laughs]

BARBARIN: But I do want to encourage other people with disabilities to do so. I just don’t think it should be me. But Neal Carter and Sarah Blahovec created an incubator for people with disabilities to learn how to become candidates and really engage voters. And I think that’s really important work. I want to see more disabled people run for office. And Olivia Babis ran for office in Florida, and that was an amazing race. So, I think that when we have disabled people at the table, things change. Things move forward. I think about certain candidates who are people with disabilities or certain politicians who are people with disabilities who’ve introduced legislation that is directly beneficial to the disability community. And that’s powerful. That would mean that people with disabilities, voters with disabilities would no longer have to carry the emotional labor of explaining why their personal experiences should not have to happen to other people. There’s somebody in office that understands and somebody in office that has these things in mind and wants to make the community better and wants to make the community feel like they’re heard and represented. So, I’m all for candidates with disabilities. I’m all for making sure that we have a seat at the table and we are elected to a seat at the table.

And I do see the same, some of the same barriers in voting accessibility that I would see in candidates with disabilities running, which is accessibility, access to information. You know, if candidates aren’t given accessible information, then what? If candidates are in districts that are having their vote suppressed for using the ADA, then what happens? So, yeah, I see a lot of the same pitfalls to people with disabilities being in office as they are to voting. But I really hope that it happens. I mean, I’m all for it. You get an endorsement from me, not automatically from being disabled. Just like a nod in the hallway. Like, I see you. But I do hope it happens.

VALLAS: And important shout-outs you gave there to Neal Carter and Sarah Blahovec. Well make sure to have the syllabus page include some links to the great work that they’ve been doing to produce those kinds of resources.

So, Imani, in the last minute or so that I have with you, I wish I had all day, we’re obviously already talking about having you back on the show soon. So, I’m already looking forward to it. I want to make sure that folks know where they can go to watch the series, Vote for Access. So, how can people learn more? How can they watch the series? And what are you hoping comes from it once everyone goes from hearing you on Off-Kilter and goes and watches all five parts?

BARBARIN: Well, you can watch Vote for Access at VoteForAccess.us. It is also on YouTube. One of the things I hope people understand is just one, how large the disability community is and how powerful we are if we had the tools [chuckles] to be so. But also just how many barriers are in the everyday lives of people with disabilities and how they affect our right to have our voices heard via a ballot. And what I really want people to do upon watching this video is one, vote. Otherwise, [laughs]. I really want people to vote and make sure that they feel like they are participating in the electoral process. But I really want non-disabled people to hold their politicians to task. I want you to investigate whether or not the polling places in your area are accessible. I want you to investigate what your politicians are doing to make them so. And I want to make sure that you are calling them, writing them and garnering their attention, so that we can make sure that people with disabilities are voting, feel like they have their voices heard, and are having policies that reflect our community.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Imani Barbarin. Amani’s the Director of Communications and Outreach at Disability Rights Pennsylvania. You can find Vote for Access on our syllabus page or also as you just heard, at VoteForAccess.us It launched just this week. So, lots to come from Imani and that team. And Imani, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show to kind of preview what you guys are doing and for all of your incredible work on this. This is just a really, really fabulous and really important and incredibly timely series. So, congratulations to you and the whole team that worked on this. And it’s been such a pleasure to get to talk to you about it today.

BARBARIN: Thank you. And can I just take the time to think the teams at Block by Block Creative and Rooted In Rights who worked tirelessly on this? They’ve been working on this for almost a year now. And so, I’m really appreciative of them and their work and their dedication to this issue. They have been amazing in every single step of the process. So, thank you to Rooted In Rights and Block by Block Creative.

VALLAS: Really, really important work. And we’ll actually have some links on the syllabus page as well to some of the other projects that Rooted In Rights and these folks have done, including on the sub-minimum wage and other really important topics that short documentary films can really educate a lot of people about in ways that writing lots of research papers and other things which are great too, and folks like me do plenty of, don’t always quite have the same impact as.

Imani, thanks for taking the time. And I’m already looking forward to talking with you next time. And take good care in this moment.

BARBARIN: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Transcripts are courtesy of Cheryl Green. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.