On the day of the New Hampshire primary back in February of 2016, I accompanied Jameyanne Fuller, a blind voter, to the polls in Manchester. I'd been introduced to her by the Disability Rights Center in the state, and she told me she was super excited to vote for the first time entirely by herself. New Hampshire, it turned out, had a new audio and touchscreen voting machine that should have been fully accessible to blind voters. In the past, Fuller had had to vote with an assistant, but now, she could exercise her franchise independently. The machine didn't work at first, but a technician came to solve the problem quickly, and Fuller was able to cast her vote in privacy. For her efforts, she received the New Hampshire "I voted" sticker, in which the white outline of a person in a wheelchair is depicted in front of the "N" in "NH." Disability rights, the sticker suggests, are now fully integrated into the New Hampshire voting process.
https://goo.gl/mRkVRj
Which makes the new American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit alleging widespread disability discrimination in New Hampshire's absentee ballot process all the more troubling. According to the complaint, the state requires signatures on absentee ballots to match those on the application form for the ballot. In the event that the signatures don't match, as determined by untrained election moderators, the state just throws out the ballot without notifying the affected voter. According to the lawsuit, hundreds of ballots are thrown out every election. "Even one disenfranchised voter," the complaint reads, "is too many. And no voter should be disenfranchised simply because of penmanship."