On Election Day 5th May 2016, Swansea resident Susie Jewell arrived at Brynmill polling station only to find that there was no disabled parking.
“When I got inside and pointed it out, the Officials said they’d already complained to the council about the parking problems that morning,” Susie told me.
A visit to the location showed that despite double yellows with stripes down the kerb in the area, as well as resident’s only parking and two bus stops, it would have been a simple matter to keep a space free for disabled vehicles right in front of the entrance.
Without that, it was not easy to access by vehicle for anyone, but extremely hard to impossible for those with mobility impairments.
The Council’s Legal Obligations to Disabled Voters
Looking on the Internet, Susie found that there is a legal requirement for accessibility, and for disabled parking to be monitored at polling stations.
Scope’s website quote advice from The Electoral Commission that “Polling stations must make reasonable adjustments to practices and procedures so that disabled people are not disadvantaged in any way” .
The same document also states that “Disabled car parking should be clearly visible and monitored throughout the day“.
“I phoned the council to let them know,” Susie explained “but when I told the Council official on the phone that there was no disabled parking at the polling station, they responded that they couldn’t be expected to police the parking.
“I said that monitoring an accessible disabled parking space is a legal requirement for a polling station and that if I had been a wheelchair user I wouldn’t have been able to vote”.
Susie suggested to the Council that it would be simple and easy to rectify the situation by creating a temporary disabled parking space on the street outside, and that this should be done asap in order to avoid legal consequences.
On going back later in the evening however, she found that this simple remedy had not been implemented.
Do “inaccessible votes” matter?
So could the outcome of the election have been affected by the non-provision of a monitored accessible parking space?
The Council’s lack of awareness of their legal obligations to monitor accessible parking spaces points to the possibility of the same thing having happened in other wards as well.
Without that information, I had a go at working out how many of the the population of Brynmill of voting age, (around 7,825), are mobility impaired (people with unspecified impairment in wales amount to 19% of the population, but rises dramatically with age) and excluding postal voters (17.7% of those that voted in the 2015 general election).
But I got stymied by not being able to properly estimate the turn out, by virtue of the fact that what I was trying to find out was who had turned out but couldn’t get in, and had to turn back instead.
As Labour won Swansea West with a majority of over 5,000, the potential number of “inaccessible votes” couldn’t possibly have been large enough to have let Welsh Conservatives overtake Labour, even had all those extra disabled people had voted for them, which, let’s face it, was never going to happen.
The same likelihood that no disabled people would have voted Tory makes the 709 difference between them and Plaid Cymru potentially significant though.
And the difference between 3rd place Plaid Cymru and UKIP was only 167, a result that could all too easily have been skewed by non accessible votes.
So it seems reasonable to conclude not only that inaccessible votes could have skewed the election but that they may have done so.
The Council was legally required to remove obstacles to disabled people voting, which they could have easily done, but chose not to.
If your policy on parliamentary democracy is “every vote counts except disabled votes” then you can call it what you like, but it’s not democracy.
What next?
Are you shocked that the Council did nothing to fulfill its obligations even after two complaints that we know of early on in the day, one by the officials running the station and one by Ms Jewell?
Do you know of other similar situations in other locations? What should be done about it? Let us know in the comments.
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Brynmill, democracy, disabled parking, discrimination, Election 2016, equality, Human Rights, inequality, Labour, Parliamentary democracy, Swansea Council, UKIP, voting accessibility, Welsh Conservatives, Welsh Liberal Democrats
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