3/27/25 - Voting rights, Social Security chaos, and erasing advice for businesses
The hits just keep coming ...
Disability Voting News: March 26, 2025
Sarah Blahovec, The Accessible Voting Booth- March 26, 2025
"Regardless of which documents are accepted, the people who will be most impacted by a DPOC requirement are young people and elderly people who are less likely to have ID, people who have changed their names from what appears on their birth certificate (including married people who adopted their spouse's name and trans people who have changed their names), and lower-income voters who cannot afford to obtain passports or citizenship documents. And as we saw in New Hampshire, which enacted a DPOC requirement this year, these laws are absolutely preventing citizens from registering to vote and casting a ballot."
This is one of those arguments we in our various disability communities tend to think have been decided already, but that we still really need to have, in the most basic terms, with a wide swath of our non-disabled fellow citizens. A lot of people think it's just common sense to require some kind of substantial legal ID in order to be allowed to vote. Even people who don't believe in the repeatedly disproved myth of massive voter fraud say, "What's the big deal with requiring ID anyway, for something as important as voting?" What disabled people in particular need to describe, I think, is how much every piece of red tape added to the voting process makes voting exponentially harder for people with disabilities. For many of us, every otherwise tiny administrative hurdle is twelve times higher for us than for non-disabled people. And whatever the intent of these measures might be, their effect is to suppress our vote. That's an outcome nobody should be willing to accept.
Read the whole piece. It's well-researched and contains important details we should all be prepared to talk about to our family, friends, and neighbors – as well as other voting accessibility news from around the U.S.
Social Security Is Breaking Down— Millions Will Feel It First
Teresa Ghilarducci, Forbes.com- March 25, 2025
"Lutnick’s remarks come during a time when the Social Security system faces record demand and historic strain. And the remarks come during a month of extreme alarm and confusion about the system. Elon Musk demeaned the system publicly, calling it "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time," the New York Post reported. Field offices are overrun, wait times are spiking, and staffing levels have been slashed by 12% since 2020, notes The Washington Post. The very system that ensures timely payments to 73 million Americans is being stomped on, and senior citizens and families are feeling anxious and worse."
It's hard to pick a single threat to disabled Americans' well-being from the Trump administration. But the possibility of Social Security benefits being formally changed in some way, or the agency simply being rendered incapable of doing its job, may well be the worst outcome possible for disabled people right now. The scariest thought is that it's looking more and more possible for disabled Americans to lose massive amounts of support without Trump actually violating has past promises not to cut benefits. My concern – similar to my thoughts yesterday on the Department of Education – is that they will somehow engineer things so that when disabled people don't get their monthly checks on time, or get cut off without warning or appeal, they will blame Social Security itself, the agency, and not the administration and its completely intentional ideological campaign.
Citing Trump order, Justice Department cuts disability guidance for businesses
Ken Alltucker, USA Today - March 20, 2025
"The Justice Department this week announced the removal of 11 guidelines for businesses seeking to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act ... The agency said removing the 'unnecessary and outdated guidance' will help businesses comply with the federal disability law and eliminate unnecessary review. The agency cited a Jan. 20 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that called on federal agencies to take action to lower the cost of living."
How does deleting technical assistance and advice to businesses on complying with disability rights laws lower the cost of living? Or, is this just an unusually simple and petty example of people who instinctively despise government involvement in any sort of equality and inclusion effort going in and erasing stuff that irritates them? The effect is that free, sound, thoughtfully-developed, reliable advice is now much less available than it once was to business owners and managers. How is that in any sense helpful, to anyone?
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