I am the parent of a now 21 year old daughter who was born
blind. All her life I have advocated on her behalf and faced
struggle at struggle to get her what she needed or in some cases,
like her education, had a Right to. I have always impresesed upon
her to know what her rights are and to speak out.
When she voted for the first time in the last federal Election,
I was so proud that she was now able to be a voter and to take the
steps to decide who she felt was best to lead our government. I
took her to hear all the
candidates and she decided that she wanted to campain for one, and
she did. But when it came to election day she was given a template
with no names on it. An elections officer recited the names to her
and she had to do her best to remember the names in the order given
and make her mark in the appropriate hole in the template. This is
not acceptable. If there were no names on the ballots at all, and
the sighted voters were told that instead of names on the ballots
this year, the elections officer is going to recite the names to
the voters there would be a public outcry!
There are as I understand, certain Canada Electoral laws and
policies which govern the electoral processes, but how good are
these laws and policies if they are not adhered to and who exactly
is responsible to ensure that they are and what sort of penalites
occur when they are not?
After the last federal election we wrote Elections Canada and we
spoke directly to our local MP about this concern and we were
assured that this would be looked into and that they fully
understood our reasons for concern. After all according
to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, she does have the right to
vote just as we all do, in a secret ballot.
Well obviously they neither understood us nor did they do
anything about our concerns, as the templates for this election are
exactly the same as the last; no names on the template. This is
inexcusable. As soon as we discovered this we let our concerns be
known at the Elections Canada office here locally and in Ottawa. We
requested that the template be adapted to accommodate a braille
user.
This is not rocket science here folks, it is called common sense
and a will to commit to ensuring that every citizen is respected
and that they, like everyone else are given the Right to a secret
ballot. For this template
to be braille would take under five minutes, no more than it would
take to write out or type out the names in print.
Steps should have been taken to make the voting system more
accessible and more discussion with various voters needs to take
place. The area of an electronic voting system needs to be
explored.
At any rate, if we are not able to get the template brailled in
time to vote, for the second time, my daughter will be denied her
constitutional right to a private vote.
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