Amanda Gadd arrived at the fire station in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on Election Day hoping that this time things would be different. When she voted in the primary, Gadd, who uses a wheelchair after five years of being on crutches, found that her polling place did not have a wheelchair-accessible voting booth. She was forced to cast her ballot at the end of a table where people were lined up waiting their turn. Her vote was exposed, and she observed that other voters were indeed looking at her ballot.

Gadd called city officials and let them know about the issue, expecting it would be fixed by the general election. It was not. “I was once again forced to vote with ten to eighteen people standing around me waiting for their turn at a private voting booth,” Gadd told Jacobin. “Someone I work with was able to read my ballot.”

In 2016, the US Government Accountability Office looked at a sampling of polling places around the country and found that an astonishing 60 percent featured one or more impediments to people with disabilities. The same study found that 65 percent had an accessible voting station, but it did not meet the requirements for casting a private vote.