A day before the voting deadline in Alaska's U.S. House special primary, a judge ruled the results of the state’s first all-mail election could not be certified until visually impaired voters were given a “full and fair” opportunity to cast their ballots.
by the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights against the Alaska Division of Election and Lt. Gov. Keven Meyer, who oversees the division. The commission asserted that the primary, which is the state’s first all-mail election, does not provide visually impaired voters in the state adequate voting access.
The certification of election results is currently scheduled to take place June 25, two weeks after the voting deadline on Saturday. The human rights commission argued that the all-mail ballots are not accessible to visually impaired voters without assistance from a seeing individual, and that solutions currently offered by the division are inadequate.
“If someone had been thinking and noting what was going on in the other states, they would have been starting to get everything ready so that everyone could vote and everyone could vote a secret and accessible ballot,” Lucas said. Nate Kile, program director at the Alaska Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, said he has used the accessible voting machines in previous elections. But even when the machines are available, the situation isn’t perfect. Kile said in one election, he simply gave up after poll workers failed to operate the accessible voting machine, and instead relied on a poll worker to fill out the ballot for him.
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