Emily Ladau: Hi, I’m Emily Ladau.
Kyle Khachadurian: And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.
Emily Ladau: And you’re listening to a pandemic version of The Accessible Stall.
Kyle Khachadurian: How are you doing Emily?
Emily Ladau: I don’t even know how I’m doing. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know where I am. That’s not true. Same place I always am. How are you?
Kyle Khachadurian: I am fine, and we are fine. We hope you are fine.
Emily Ladau: Yes, most importantly, we hope that you and your loved ones are healthy as well. On top of that though, did you all forget that there’s an election happening in November? Because sometimes I feel like I forgot.
Kyle Khachadurian: I feel like this is a mild segue in what we’re talking about today, Emily.
Emily Ladau: Oh, it’s a major segue, totally set it up. Anyway, I’m pretty excited because we have a special guest who is not only special but also my friend so I’m pretty amped. Special guest, please introduce yourself.
Allexa Laycock: Hi. I’m amped to be here with you Emily and Kyle. I am Allexa Laycock. I work for Rooted in Rights. I’m an editor and I guess everythinger there. Hi everyone. I’m really happy to be on this podcast today to talk to you about voting.
Kyle Khachadurian: Really exciting.
Emily Ladau: Yeah, super pumped but also what about voting? What are we talking about today?
Allexa Laycock: We’re going to talk about a voting series called Vote for Access that’s produced by Rooted in Rights and Block by Block Creative, and sponsored by so many P&As from all cross the country. It’s about the right to vote for folks with disabilities and common things that aren’t thought about, should be thought about and hopefully will be thought about as we’re moving forward in voting options.
Emily Ladau: Hey Allexa, what’s a P&A?
Allexa Laycock: Thanks for asking. A P&A is a protection and advocacy organization. Each state and territory in the United States has a protection and advocacy organization that’s designed to protect the rights of people with disabilities.
Emily Ladau: I think they’re not a well-known resource, or as well-known as they should be.
Allexa Laycock: No, I definitely think that that’s true. Part of what we’re hoping to do with this voting series is say like, “Hey, you have a protection advocacy organization in your state. They are literally designed to help you vote.” That’s one of the things that they do. It’s one of their funding sources, so reach out to them and figure out what resources they have available because they’re there to help you.
Kyle Khachadurian: That really is awesome. It’s funny because before I heard of Rooted in Rights and Disability Rights Washington, I did not even know what a P&A was, truth guys.
Allexa Laycock: I didn’t know what P&A was either. I looked up… I found Rooted in Rights not because I knew what a P&A was but because always like video things in Seattle where I live. Then I found out about this whole system that actually probably could have helped me out a lot in previous years. I just didn’t know about it.
Kyle Khachadurian: I guess that speaks to why a project like this is so important.
Allexa Laycock: Yes. I mean, hopefully this gets the word out not only about voting rights but about resources that can help everyone vote.
Kyle Khachadurian: Speaking of this project, I came onto it as an employee/representative of Block by Block Creative. I’m part of the distro team and I was not part of the production team but I know you were.
Allexa Laycock: Oh, yes.
Kyle Khachadurian: When I showed up, you were just wrapping up the editing to this project so I didn’t really have any idea of how the project was put together or came to life. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Allexa Laycock: The project is a five-episode series on voting. This project initially was thought of by Jordan Melograna and he had a company, Block by Block Creative. He used to direct Rooted in Rights as well but he pitched this project as a collaboration between Block by Block and Rooted in Rights. He also pitched it to a bunch of protection and advocacy organizations at the National Disability Rights Network Conference. A bunch of P&As or protection and advocacy organizations signed up to basically sponsor the project to get to have input about what we included and then ultimately to distribute it.
Initially, we were going to go to a bunch of different states and interview people in person and find out different stories about voting, but we ended up realizing that the budget was just going to be too high to travel to each state and so we came up with the idea of having a host and then doing remote interviews so that we could get a range of perspectives from a bunch of different states and talk to people with disabilities about their voting successes and their voting struggles and the things they’d like to see.
We brought on Imani Barbarin to be our host for the series. Emily knows Imani. I met Imani at Netroots and thought she’d be a good host for the series. She came on and we co-wrote them and then we filmed them. Now, we’re editing them and soon they will be available to everyone to inform people about voting rights and voting solutions and things to consider when you’re thinking about making voting accessible.
Emily Ladau: Fun fact. Imani was actually a guest on our podcast a while ago now talking about rise as the hashtag queen. It’s really great to see this cross-collaboration among the disability community. I would love to hear a little bit more about what the Vote for Access project entails. What are the issues that you guys are focusing on? Because as I think we all know, there are so many issues that disabled people face when it comes to elections and voting. How did you narrow it down and what do you focus on?
Allexa Laycock: That’s a great point, Emily. When you think about voting, it’s like, what isn’t an issue for folks with disabilities.
Kyle Khachadurian: Right.
Allexa Laycock: It’s harder to say what’s actually working amazingly well for everyone than it is to say, yup, there’s a lot of barriers. We split the series up into five episodes. Our first episode is Attitudes. The idea of attitudes is that there is a lot of stigma around people with disabilities and a lot of the reason that people don’t feel comfortable going out and voting is because poll workers maybe aren’t familiar with folks with disabilities and they don’t know the best way to assist if assistance was even necessary. Also, changing your attitude can be a really simple solution to making voting more accessible. If you just change your attitude about who you think should vote and why you think that is, there might be more access to voting.
Our second episode is about information. We thought it was important to include the whole spectrum of voting because voting starts when you’re learning about the issues. It’s not just the day at the polls. We have an episode about how information can be inaccessible.
Our third episode is about when you’re physically at the polls, the barriers that can be there in terms of physical access to the space and of getting to the polls to a certain extent. We have an episode about when you can’t get to the polls which is mail-in ballots and the fact that there’s a lot of great alternatives to voting but many of them aren’t accessible and they also don’t take into account different needs.
Then episode five is about voter suppression because we really felt it was important to include the disability voice in larger conversations around voter suppression because that perspective is not often included. That was a long explanation of what’s in each video.
How we narrowed that down was really we were trying to think of the whole spectrum of voting from when you find out about what you’re even supposed to vote on to the process of voting, to the process of feeling included in the process of voting and the process of democracy in America.
Emily Ladau: But I think it’s okay that that was a long answer because voting is one hell of a process when you’re disabled and we need to acknowledge that.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. Like I said, I don’t… there’s no part of the process that is actually wonderfully accessible at this point. We also were pretty clear with our project that we weren’t making get out and vote videos because there are a lot of great get out and vote videos, and also we felt like get out and vote videos ignore the fact that there are systemic barriers to voting. You can’t just always try harder through those barriers.
Kyle Khachadurian: Absolutely.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah, we really wanted to give [00:09:04 crosstalk].
Emily Ladau: That’s a good point. Everyone’s like, “Go, get out and vote,” and we’re over here like, hello, we can’t.
Allexa Laycock: Right.
Emily Ladau: Thanks for asking.
Allexa Laycock: Right. Even like for folks in really rural areas too, like just telling people to get into a car and drive four hours to get to their polling location, that’s not reasonable for everybody.
Emily Ladau: That’s so true. Honestly, my polling location is a wheelchair ride away or an even faster car ride but I can literally roll to my polling location. I know not everybody has that privilege but for me, I live in a big town with five elementary schools. That’s where they hold… or at least in one of the elementary schools is my polling place and so it’s just really easy to get there, but it’s not like that for everyone, I recognize. Especially in rural areas.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I mean, honestly there’s so many laws that have been passed that are laws designed to help specifically folks with disabilities vote. But a lot of those rights and accommodations aren’t well-known. That information isn’t as out there as I think it could be. Even if some folks do have barriers to voting but there are accommodations available or should be available that people can ask for and can definitely be exhausting to advocate for those things if they’re not already being provided when they should be. But there’s a lot of laws out there that say you have to make this… you have to make voting accessible.
Emily Ladau: Yeah. Also, in the midst of a pandemic, it seems that now more than ever, we need to be acknowledging that.
Allexa Laycock: Yes. Our fourth episode that’s about when you can’t get to the polls, we talked about mail-in ballots which are great, except that they’re not accessible. Traditional mail-in ballots are not accessible because if you just have a printed piece of paper that you have to fill in each of the bubbles independently, if you can’t access a paper ballot at a poll, there’s no reason you would be able to access it in your home. It has the same accessibility problems.
Emily Ladau: That is a challenge.
Allexa Laycock: Yes. We want people to be thinking especially as we’re considering doing different types of voting options for fall, we want to make sure that they’re accessible to start out with because we’re already hearing rumblings that states are like, “Okay, we need to immediately switch to a type of voting we haven’t used before. We can’t bother with accessibility, there’s no time,” and there has to be time. If we’re going to make a whole new system, why not just make it accessible from the start?
Emily Ladau: Right.
Kyle Khachadurian: Can you tell us about what some of those other accommodations are that you mentioned other than mail-in voting?
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. Absolutely. When you’re at the polls, there’s already a rule that folks with disabilities need to have the right to private and independent voting. At a polling center, what this can mean is that you can either get a poll worker to assist you in some way but they also need to give you privacy.
There’s also accessible voting units or AVUs that allow folks with disabilities to vote in a variety of ways. For some of them, they have different hookups so that you can hear the ballot and with headphones and make markers using a remote control thing so that you can mark your ballot with it being read aloud to you if you are blind or low vision, or if you have dyslexia and you prefer to hear rather than read.
There’s supposed to be accessible voting units at all voting centers or at least one’s available. But often, they’re there but maybe poll workers don’t know how to use them or they’re not plugged in, so that becomes a problem where there is an accessible way to vote but it’s not fully ready because it’s not plugged in or it’s not ready to go.
Basically, you have the right to private independent voting. You have the right to bring someone to assist you. If you don’t want a poll worker or if you do need assistance, you have the right to bring someone to assist you. And you do have the right to vote. I think a lot of folks with disabilities are told that maybe they can’t vote or it’s too much of a process to get them their ballots, and that’s just not true. You have the right to vote, unless for some reason your right to vote has been taken away, you do have the right to vote and there are ways to get people signed up for that.
Emily Ladau: Yeah. We are not here for the voter suppression [00:13:51 inaudible].
Allexa Laycock: Right. Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian: Can you tell me anything surprising or strange at the very least that you learned about the voting process that you didn’t know before you started researching for this series?
Allexa Laycock: There’s a lot I didn’t know when I started researching for this series, to be honest. I honestly didn’t realize in a lot of states how long you have to wait outside before you can even get into the polling place, before you can even cast your vote. Voting is really an all-day process for some people in terms of needing to drive there, needing to wait in line. I guess I didn’t realize that it was still that difficult in a lot of areas. I guess it’s not a really good specific one.
Emily Ladau: No, I mean that is specific because I don’t think that we think about that when we live in more suburban or urban areas where…
Allexa Laycock: Yeah.
Emily Ladau: Although, honestly, I take that back because I remember during the election seeing the photos from New York City of polling places that were due to close and the lines were still wrapped around the block with people who have not voted yet. I’m actually thinking because I live in a more suburban area with multiple locations to vote, I haven’t really had that problem. Either that or people just aren’t politically engaged enough in my town and so aren’t exactly showing up in rows to the polls. But it’s still something to think about. It’s not accessible for people to wait on line for that long, to say the least.
Kyle Khachadurian: I fully agree. That’s like, I don’t need many accommodations but if I need one, it’s anything to mitigate my inability stand on line. I echo Emily’s words because I live two blocks away from my polling station and I can walk there even in the worst weather and I’m and out in 10 minutes. It’s unbelievable to me that that’s not true for everybody. Even though I know it, when you see it in front of you, it’s hard to imagine that this is the reality that people face when they just want to vote.
Allexa Laycock: Right. People are willing to do it still.
Kyle Khachadurian: Yeah.
Allexa Laycock: They’re like, “Yeah, I’m going to get in the car and I’m going to use my last gas to get to the polling center.” I’m like, wow, that is really commitment to voting. I don’t even know if I would be that committed if it was that difficult for me to get to a polling place.
Emily Ladau: Well, honestly, it makes me think of everything that just went down in Wisconsin because…
Kyle Khachadurian: Yup.
Emily Ladau: …I mean, people showed up because they weren’t about to let their right to vote be taken away. But I read a story about a woman who held up a sign the entire time she was waiting on line that said, “This is ridiculous.”
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. It was truly ridiculous. There was no reason for that in a pandemic to make people go outside and stand outside together to vote.
Emily Ladau: Yeah. Which is why I think vote by mail is so important, but it’s not something that I have personal experience with. I know absentee voting is different than vote by mail. I do get absentee ballot for when I wasn’t able to drive but I really… I want them to extend vote by mail even though I know that it comes with its own subset of problems.
Allexa Laycock: Sure. Yeah. Obviously it’s not accessible if you’re blind or low vision. If you do need assistance to fill out a ballot, then your vote is not necessarily private or independent. That’s the fundamental baseline for like is your voting accessible, it means you have to be able to do it privately and independently. I do think a lot of folks with disabilities, even ones who have been using absentee or mail-in, they often have been collaborating with friends or other people that they know or family members to help them access their ballot, which is great but also that means it’s not private and independent.
Emily Ladau: Yeah, it’s a huge violation.
Allexa Laycock: Right.
Emily Ladau: I’m curious though, and you can totally be like, no, this is too much of a violation of privacy, but did you find that any of the issues that you were talking about affect you personally or did you feel like there were strategies or things that you learned more about to help mitigate voting issues for you?
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I learned information that would’ve been useful for a past me because I didn’t have an address for a really long time, and I thought because I didn’t have an address, that meant that I couldn’t vote, that I couldn’t get a mail-in ballot sent somewhere or I couldn’t go to a polling place because I didn’t have an address and so I couldn’t prove what county I was in or whatever. That actually wasn’t the case. I could’ve voted. It would’ve been a little bit trickier in terms of like assigning an address but I could have assigned and said, “Hey, here’s my friend’s address,” or, “Here’s an address of a local place in the county where you can send the mail-in ballot to.” I didn’t know that I could’ve voted even though I didn’t have an address for a couple of years. I thought I had to have my name… like I had to live somewhere. I had to have an address in order to vote.
Emily Ladau: That is really important to know.
Allexa Laycock: I think it does vary state by state. Different states have different laws about some states have voter ID laws which we don’t have in Washington State and voter ID laws do make it harder to vote. I think not having address in the state with voter ID law is definitely more of a problem. But at least in Washington State, there are options to have you register at a particular location or possibly even a public location and have that be your address for the purposes of voting. I wish I would’ve known that when I didn’t have an address for a while.
Kyle Khachadurian: There was one gentleman in one of the episodes that he’s an incarcerated gentleman and he didn’t even know that he could vote from jail.
Emily Ladau: Right.
Kyle Khachadurian: Didn’t even occur to him to ask that question.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I think a lot of folks don’t, you know, if you haven’t… if you’re in jail and you’re awaiting trial, your voting rights are intact. You might have the right to vote but is the jail going to let you vote or provide you with a way to vote? That’s iffy, and thankfully the jail in King County worked with Disability Rights Washington and they had Darya come in with an accessible voting unit and had him vote, which was great. Yeah, even for folks who maybe have had their voting rights taken away, they can be restored after a certain amount of time. So I do think there’s a lot of assumptions about who can’t vote and who isn’t allowed to vote, and I don’t think those are necessarily true. Especially for folks with disabilities often if you’re under guardianship, there can be the thought that, “Oh, I’m under guardianship so I can’t vote,” and that’s not necessarily true either. There’s just a lot of vague ideas about who can and can’t vote, and a lot more people are eligible to vote than I think realize it.
Kyle Khachadurian: Yeah, it’s a whole tangled web of kind of what knows. What are you hoping people take away from this series?
Allexa Laycock: I really hope that they take away that they have the right to vote and they have the right to accommodations, and that if the accommodations aren’t being provided, that shouldn’t be their personal problem. Those accommodations should be there. There should be a way for them to vote. They should be able to call their county or their city or their local officials and say, “Hey, I need to be able to vote. What is available? What accommodations are available? How can I do that?”
Emily Ladau: Yeah. I think more to the point is the counties and each of the… why can’t I even get the word?
Allexa Laycock: Precincts?
Emily Ladau: Precincts, yeah. They need to recognize that it’s incumbent upon them to provide accommodation but as per usual, it’s always up to disabled people to be like, “Give me accommodations.”
Allexa Laycock: Totally. That’s a story we honestly got quite a few times in the series are that people really wanted to vote and they would call every year and say, “Hey, this is my situation, this is what I need. Last year, I went and the AVU, the accessible voting unit wasn’t turned on. That’s a problem. Or the auto-mark, the poll worker didn’t know how to use it and so I couldn’t vote.” We have several stories of people who have gone year after year and tried to make it work, and sometimes it’s worked and sometimes it hasn’t. It just hasn’t been super consistent and that’s really frustrating.
Emily Ladau: I’m hoping that this is a starting point at least for people to be able to point to and say, “Hey, I do have rights.”
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. Because we do. We absolutely have rights. In the series, we talk about several different laws that already exist. Everything’s supposed to be accessible. They’re supposed to have accommodations. They should already be there. Especially in stories where it’s like there was an accessible voting unit but just nobody plugged it in. That’s so frustrating to hear, right? Because the equipment’s already there, it’s already available, and there is just one more step of actually plugging it in to make the voting possible. That is always really frustrating to hear, that “almost” story where like, it was almost accessible. What I’m concerned with this voting in fall is that we’re going to have an “almost” story again. Like, “Oh, we almost considered some other options to make voting more accessible but then we didn’t.” I don’t want that to be the case.
Kyle Khachadurian: That’s extremely frustrating even to hear because I can imagine that if you’re that voter whose machine was not plugged in, that you’re not going to want to go to the polls next year. Why would you even bother?
Allexa Laycock: Right.
Kyle Khachadurian: They clearly didn’t care about you once before.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. There’s a lot of frustration out there because they’re… folks with disabilities, we want to participate, we want to vote. Policies really affect us. Policies about healthcare. Policies about housing. Policies about jobs. They all affect folks with disabilities and we’re definitely not voting in proportion to how many laws are being written that directly affect us.
Emily Ladau: Amen to that. That is so true. This is the kind of episode where I really appreciate talking about something that’s such a huge issue and it also manages to bum me out at the same time because we’re still having this conversation. Like, why are we still having this conversation? I know why but I’m sick of it.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I definitely feel that. I think that there was… before I did the project, I think there’s a part of me that’s like, oh yeah, you can vote if you want to vote. You put a little work into it. Then I really dived deep and I was like, wow, it is… I know that they, whoever they are, I’ll try to be a little vague here, don’t want people to vote. We know that voter suppression is a huge problem in many communities and we know that folks with disabilities are disproportionately represented in the communities that are already super big targets for voter suppression. And so, we’re really getting a one, two, three, four, five punch of these are all the ways that your vote, we’re trying to keep your vote… or sorry, these are all the ways that we’re trying to keep you from voting. There’s just so many overlapping layers of suppression.
Emily Ladau: Yeah, it reminds me of the situation in I think it was Georgia during the last presidential election where they were like, we’re just going to close… was it the presidential election? Maybe it wasn’t.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I think that it was. I thought that it was in 2016.
Emily Ladau: Okay, when they were just like, “Yeah, we’re actually just going to close different places to vote because… or the polling locations because they’re not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.” It’s like, that, you could just fix the accessibility, but no, instead, you’re going to close it and suppress entire precincts of voters. Okay.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. Unfortunately, Georgia was not one of the P&As that was in the series but we do have some other folks who are definitely talking about the ways that suppression is hitting ultimately marginalized communities. But yeah, weaponizing the ADA to further disenfranchised voters of color is real rough. That’s the nicest way I can say it. It’s…
Emily Ladau: It’s basically what it is.
Kyle Khachadurian: Disgusting.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah, it’s absolutely gross. If you close a polling place down because it’s not accessible, you’re supposed to replace it with an accessible option. Yeah, it’s very clear that the only moment that folks with disabilities are being included was as a way to disenfranchise other voters rather than like, okay, we actually need to make this accessible. It was just a weird excuse to close polling places.
Emily Ladau: Got to love pitting minorities against each other.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. I think it goes so well when you say because everyone benefits and nothing is lost.
Emily Ladau: What can we do? We can watch the series, but is there actions that we can take?
Allexa Laycock: What a great question. I really have been focusing on getting the series together, but in terms of other actions, I do think that having a more unified voice between other Civil Rights advocates that are really, really invested in voting rights including the disability perspective, because I do think one of the things that I learned is that there’s not really a disability voice in a lot of these other voting movements. Obviously, there’s some disability specific organizations which are great but I think we’re still struggling to get the disability perspective in a larger conversation around voter suppression. I think it’s so very much not there.
I guess little things could even be like if you’re seeing candidate videos or information on social media and there’s not captions or there’s no other descriptions in videos, like write comments and be like, “Hey, this needs to be captioned,” or ask for other resources. Which again is people having to do their own advocacy all the time, but I think unfortunately that’s still where we’re at is getting this issue to be… like for people to take it really seriously instead of just not thinking about it at all, which I think is unfortunately a little bit where we’re at right now. Sorry, other actions. I’m trying to think while I’m talking and that’s not going super great.
Emily Ladau: No. I think honestly, you really covered it. Kyle, do you think that we have reached the grand moment of final takeaways or do you have any other questions?
Kyle Khachadurian: My question could be a final takeaway, kind of.
Emily Ladau: Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian: I’ll let you off with an easy one. Do you have a favorite episode?
Allexa Laycock: I don’t have a favorite episode. I don’t think I have a favorite episode. I think probably the episode about when you can’t get to the polls is going to be the most relevant for this particular moment in time because we are all in a moment in time where we can’t really get to anywhere.
Kyle Khachadurian: Yeah.
Allexa Laycock: We have jokes in the series. We wanted to make it a punchy John Oliver style thing which it sort of is and then it’s sort of its own thing but I fought for two jokes and I don’t even know if they’re funny anymore.
Kyle Khachadurian: They are funny.
Allexa Laycock: There’s a bachelorette joke and there’s a [00:30:33 Gritty] joke. Those are the two jokes that I was like, yeah…
Emily Ladau: Gritty.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah.
Kyle Khachadurian: Yes.
Allexa Laycock: I did for you, Emily.
Emily Ladau: Oh god.
Allexa Laycock: I really, really fought to keep… and it’s barely even a joke, but I really fought to keep that reference and I really fought to make minority bachelorette joke. Those were the hills I chose to die on.
Emily Ladau: Kyle has already seen it. Allexa obviously you’ve seen it because you worked on it. I haven’t. But honestly, if you need a selling point people, there’s a Gritty joke, and I love Gritty so much. My boyfriend jokes that Gritty is my other boyfriend.
Kyle Khachadurian: Isn’t he though?
Emily Ladau: Yes, he is. Yes, he is. He really is. I love him so much.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah, go and find the jokes in there. I wrote the series with Imani. I filmed it. I’m editing it. I’ve really been in it since the beginning, since we started outlining and figuring out what did we want to include, what did each P&A want us to cover, how do we smooch that altogether and there’s, you know…
Emily Ladau: And the special guest does it all.
Allexa Laycock: Yes. Yes, I do. Obviously, not everything made it into the episodes. There are only about five minutes a piece, so it’s concise looks at these issues but we’re really hoping that they start a larger conversation and that hearing people’s stories, people’s individual stories about voting and why they think it’s important and what’s worked for them, what hasn’t worked for them can start a larger conversation so people can feel more represented in maybe not having access to voting or just feeling included and part of democracy, because I think often… I mean, it’s a weird moment, right? It’s hard to feel motivated I think to vote in this particular pandemic moment, to be honest. I’ve been working on the series and obviously I want people to watch it. I want people to vote to figure out strategies to vote, but I do think it’s a little hard to be motivated. But I think it’s more important than ever that we try to vote and we try and engage with the process. Even though I know [00:32:54 crosstalk].
Emily Ladau: I hope this lights a fire under people to do that.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah. Lighting a fire might be overreach for the current moment that we’re in in terms of a global pandemic.
Emily Ladau: Fair, fair, fair.
Allexa Laycock: I would take like just a little bit of hutzpah, just to scorch and scratch would be enough. I don’t think I need a full bonfire of motivation from people but maybe… hopefully it gives people the sense that they’re not the only people experiencing these barriers and that it’s kind of BS that these barriers still exist, and they shouldn’t. But there’s a lot of disagreement between voting groups. Even groups who were trying to make voting happen. And so I think that disagreement is sometimes overwhelming but I’m hoping people are more open to honest conversations about what it’s going to take to get voting to happen. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
Emily Ladau: No, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Allexa Laycock: There is a bunch of tension between like around security and having online voting options, even though online voting options are probably going to end up being the most accessible, but I don’t know if we want to include that whole debate in here because it’s pretty spicy.
Emily Ladau: No, I feel like that sounds [00:34:13 crosstalk].
Kyle Khachadurian: Yeah, that’s for another day.
Allexa Laycock: I was trying not to go into too many super specifics.
Emily Ladau: I think that you’ve covered a whole lot and we can cut and paste, and by we, I mean Kyle, because he’s brilliant. Kyle, do you have anything we should add or cover or you want to do your final takeaway?
Kyle Khachadurian: No, I just want to thank Allexa for her time.
Emily Ladau: Special guest, where can we find these voting videos?
Allexa Laycock: The voting videos will be available by the end of April and they will be at voteforaccess.us, so V-O-T-E-F-O-R-A-C-C-E-S-S dot U-S.
Emily Ladau: I’m pretty pumped.
Kyle Khachadurian: So am I.
Allexa Laycock: I was looking at my notes and be like, do I say thing that I felt was essential before? I think I wrote it better, but that’s fine. You can use any of that for any kind of shared text you want, Kyle.
Kyle Khachadurian: No, you are fine.
Emily Ladau: So that has been another episode of The Accessible Stall. I’m Emily, he’s Kyle, and I have always wanted to do that because he always beats me to it.
Allexa Laycock: Success.
Kyle Khachadurian: And might we say, you look great today. Stay indoors. Wash your hands, please.
Emily Ladau: Seriously, wash them.
Allexa Laycock: Yeah, wash your hands and then vote.
Emily Ladau: Then wash your hands after you vote.
Allexa Laycock: Yes.
Kyle Khachadurian: Who knows where those ballots have been.
Emily Ladau: Oh my gosh.
Kyle Khachadurian: Thanks for listening, everybody.
Emily Ladau: We love you. Bye.