Global Initiative to Enfranchise People with Disabilities

September 17, 2002, Tuesday, Final Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A19; THE IDEAS INDUSTRY RICHARD MORIN AND CLAUDIA DEANE

HEADLINE: A Vision for Voting in Sierra Leone

For those of you who don't yet know, war-torn Sierra Leone held successful national presidential elections this spring. And the good news gets better: Even the blind were able to vote by secret ballot -- no easy task.

"In Sierra Leone, you vote by thumb print -- or toe print if you don't have arms, such as the many amputees," said Jerry Mindes, the disability adviser at the International Foundation for Election Systems, a D.C.-based NGO (nongovernmental organization) involved in promoting democratic institutions.

The problem for the blind, who, Mindes said, are "almost universally denied the right to a secret ballot," is that in many cases they must reveal their vote choice to another person (problem one) without any way to check that it is recorded accurately (problem two). In Sierra Leone this year, though, "we developed a system whereby blind voters insert their ballot into a folder with raised dots that identify the places where to put their thumbprint." Funded by those ever-progressive folks from Finland and Sweden, IFES has been working with election officials and disability groups to create pilot programs in about a dozen countries. Among their recent experiments: blind election observers in Ghana and the first-ever use of adults with Down syndrome as election monitors, which took place in Nicaragua.

"It's a way of promoting the participation of citizens with disabilities at the same time as promoting awareness of disabilities in society in general," Mindes said.

Now the group has launched a new Web site cataloguing how election laws in more than 200 countries treat voters with disabilities. "It's a tool for both election administrators and disability groups who want to know if they are disenfranchised, and if so, how," Mindes said.

You can access the Web site at www.electionaccess.org.