Why Can"t We Vote At FORD?

I received a response the other day to my part of a class action lawsuit against the city of Lynn for closing down the Ford School polling location in 2004 for reasons of non-compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). One would think that I should have been overjoyed to see the voting rights of the disabled treated with such respect and sensitivity. Or were they?

You would think the remaining locations would be violation free. My personal inspection of all eight remaining polling places found the opposite to be true. Every polling station had some violation. So does that mean we should close down every other place?

The spirit of ADA is not confrontational. As a community, we disabled have been oppressed too long and we have learned from great examples of past discrimination that real change does not come from the point of a sword but instead from the point of a pen especially when used in a ballot box.

So it infuriates me when the ADA legislation is perverted to be used as a justification for a possibly dubious task. This law is meant to be one of accommodation and participation, not one of retribution and retaliation. ADA is not just to protect the disabled minority, everyone at some time in their lives will have the opportunity to benefit from the realities of its enforcement.

Failures to enact this legislation because of solely financial reasons is unacceptable. The purpose of this legislation was to insure civil rights, equal rights. You can't put a price on that.