New England cherishes its local elections—but many disabled voters are locked out

Kate Larose will not be able to participate in Vermont’s Town Meeting Day.

Vermont is home to one of the oldest and most cherished forms of local election in the country: town meetings, a day-long form of deliberative democracy that reads as the antidote to authoritarianism. It’s the kind of American tradition the White House seems to be at war with.

Every first Tuesday of March, Vermonters participate in their local town’s elections via floor votes, long conducted entirely in person in states that adopt the practice.

Larose’s request to mark her votes at home was rejected; so was that of her husband, who has a debilitating case of Long Covid. For this crucial annual event, there’s little oversight on whether towns’ accommodation process complies with disability and voting access laws.

“There are towns right now in Vermont that are voting on making sure that essentially, unhoused people can’t exist in their town,” said Larose, a youth services coordinator with the Vermont Center for Independent Living. “And I can’t vote [against] that.”

Town meeting days are a New England tradition, most prevalent in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as some towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut. They predate all disability civil rights laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act—which can be painfully clear to disabled people, who face a wide range of often prohibitive access issues when trying to participate, from inaccessible buildings to unsustainably long meetings.

That makes it far more difficult for disabled people in those states to change the laws that lock them out of civic life, or weigh in on issues that have especially high stakes for them, including transportation and education. The impact is especially clear in Vermont and New Hampshire, which in 2022 respectively ranked third and first in the MIT Elections Lab’s list of worst states for disability access. 

Deliberative democracy in other states—like Iowa’s famous caucus, and those in Idaho and Wyoming—takes cues from New England’s. Traditionalists hold that physically sharing the room for long discussions is essential to the process, and part of the fabric of local life. Disability advocates point out that comes at the cost of their participation.

“There is really a lack of enforcement, and in some of these states, they have conflicting laws that really put historic treasured tradition above access,” the American Association of People with Disabilities’ director of accessible democracy, Alexia Kemerling, told me. “It’s a really heartbreaking example of who gets left behind in systems that are not built for everyone.” 

The Iowa caucus, probably the highest-profile national example of in-person direct democracy, has long been criticized for being inaccessible. But in 2024, to accommodate disabled Iowans in its caucus, the Iowa Democratic Party shifted its caucus in-person discussions followed by mail voting. It’s a strong example that voting models can change. Similar changes in Vermont have been held up by the lack of disabled voters at Town Meeting Day, where the changes would need to be passed—a Catch-22 that illustrates wider hurdles to passing disability rights legislation. Unless the state’s legislature takes action, adoption of more widespread Iowa-style changes is likely to remain limited.

Larose has been one of many Vermont disability advocates to push for an easier process: allowing disabled people to drop off their ballots (as some towns now do, alongside seven that mail ballots to all voters) or vote in a hybrid manner, for instance via polls on Zoom. Larose told me that even a statewide working group she was on gave painfully inadequate guidance to direct towns to make their Town Meeting Day more accessible, with outcomes she found so frustrating that she resigned from the group in early February.  

The Vermont disability advocates whom I spoke with expressed frustration about the lack of top-down action by state lawmakers and officials. Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas told me in an interview that she’s not opposed—Vermont is, after all, one of eight states that allows any registered voter to vote by mail in state and federal races—but that it was up to the towns, not her office. It’s a window into the kinds of bureaucratic problems that hold up many overdue improvements to local elections.

“We can’t burn the place down because we don’t like what they do in terms of accessibility with their local elections,” Hanzas said, “but we can offer them best practices.” 

But the ADA still binds those officials, as do statewide access and voting laws that go even further. “The Americans with Disabilities Act does cover even local elections,” said Kemerling, of the American Association of People with Disabilities. “The Department of Justice put out updated guidance in 2024 that made that even more clear.”

Responding to traditionalists, ACLU of Vermont’s Jessica Radbord pointed out that women once couldn’t vote in town meetings, citing a nearly 200-year-old state supreme court case acknowledging that local elections would grow and change. “We can do things a little bit differently to make this process more accessible to people, to take advantage of new technologies or new systems that are going to make our democracy more inclusive,” Radbord said. “Because a more inclusive democracy is a healthier democracy, and that’s what everybody wants.”