21^st February 2000

Disability Rights Unit
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
GPO Box 5218
Sydney 1042

The Australian Quadriplegic Association (AQA) represents the interests of people with severe physical disabilities such as quadriplegia and paraplegia.

Most of our members use wheelchairs for mobility purposes. We would therefore like to draw your attention particularly to the current scarcity of wheelchair accessible polling booths.

We understand that many voting places are schools and community halls built many years ago, well before the advent of the Disability Discrimination Act, and are not at all accessible. To continue to use these places as polling booths is to deny full citizenship rights to people with disabilities.

Of the 2,775 booths used at the 1999 NSW State Election 1,305 were described as 'best access for a person with a disability' which could have any number of meanings regarding the real state of the access. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), on the other hand, categorises accessible booths as either 'accessible' or 'accessible with assistance'. This grading of accessibility by the AEC has the advantage of giving people with disabilities some basis on which to decide where they will go to vote.

The question of who actually 'certifies' a polling booth as 'accessible' is an important one. The Australian Standards on Accessibility should clearly be applied and people experienced in their application should be used to make the determinations. If the task is to be left, as we understand it currently is, to Returning Officers, then they should be trained to apply the access standards. As an organisation which specialises in access matters, we would be happy to discuss this matter in more detail at any time.

Due to the inaccessibility of some booths it is not unusual for Polling Officials to take ballot papers outside for people in wheelchairs. Being in such close proximity it is possible for Polling Officials to witness the ballot paper being marked, and we have anecdotal evidence of them pressuring voters to vote 'above the line' to save time both then and in later counting. Sometimes, because they may have only limited hand function, people with disabilities will need the Polling Official to mark their ballot papers. We are aware of Polling Officials asking that a partner or carer complete this task, thereby denying the person with a disability the right to a secret vote.

While postal voting facilities are available we do not believe that anybody, including people with disabilities, should be forced to undertake a postal vote as this denies them the right to take part in the electoral process by attending a polling place on election day with their fellow citizens. We would therefore like to suggest that the various electoral authorities take a pro-active approach to the problem by seeking out accessible venues and insisting that modifications be made to existing venues to ensure that people who use wheelchairs can access them independently wherever possible.

Of course some people with very severe physical disabilities simply cannot visit a polling booth or guarantee that they will be able to attend on election day and accordingly may need to either postal vote or pre-poll. Pre-poll facilities should always be fully accessible, while for those wishing to always postal vote the General Postal Voter (GPV) facility should be more widely advertised to save them from having to fill in a postal vote application form every time. The AEC and state electoral offices could perhaps check their records for recurrent postal voters and contact them to advise of the availability of the GPV.

Thank you for allowing us to comment on these matters. If you require any more information on the matters we have raised, please do not hesitate to contact our Policy Officer Digby Hughes on (02) 9661 8855.

Felicity Purdy

Community Services Manager