Dr. Scott Crawford couldn’t get his wheelchair through the door of the Hinds County, Mississippi, polling place he was inspecting several years ago. The door frame to enter Chastain Middle School’s gym should’ve been wide enough—but for the metal bar running down the center of it.
“It’s a non-starter,” he told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 26. “I could not get my wheelchair through that double door because neither side was wide enough with that metal bar running down the middle. You need at least a minimum 32” of clearance, but it is preferable to have 34” clear width.”
Those kinds of challenges at polling places aren’t unusual for Crawford, as both a wheelchair user himself and a disability rights activist in Jackson. Under federal law, polling places are supposed to adhere to requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure disabled voters have equal access to polling places. But polling sites across Mississippi often fail to meet basic ADA requirements, he said.
Ahead of the 2023 primaries, he repeatedly raised serious concerns about a Hinds County polling place hosting 1,585 voters that he called “a metal box,” made out of a small shipping container that was inaccessible in a myriad of ways: It was too small for a wheelchair user to maneuver in alongside machines, other voters and poll workers; it had no guardrails; there was a two-inch lip at the bottom of the ramp; and there was an inch-and-a-half gap between the top of the ramp and the door, which opened outwards.
Crawford told the Mississippi Free Press that he told Hinds County supervisors about the problems with the precinct weeks before election day. But Hinds County election commissioners only moved that polling place at the last minute after he made an appearance on local news, just hours before voters arrived to cast ballots in that year’s state party primaries.
For many disabled Mississippians, the sorts of hurdles Crawford has identified at polling places across Jackson are all too common on Election Day. Mississippi’s disability rate is 19.5%, the second highest in the nation and well above the national rate of 14%.
Under the ADA, election officials are supposed to ensure basic access to polling places in the following areas:
- Parking: In areas that provide parking, polling places are required to provide accessible spaces (or about 1 van-accessible space per 25 spaces).
- Accessible routes: Paths from parking, drop-off spots, sidewalks and transit stops must be at least 36” wide, with curb cuts, and must not require the use of steps. The route for checking in at the polling place and getting to the voting station must also be 36” wide with a 60” turning circle in front of each polling station and at least one accessible machine.
- Ramps: The slope of ramps must be no steeper than a 1:12 slope with level landings at the top and bottom; any ramps rising more than 6” must have handrails.
- Entrances: Entrances must be accessible with a door opening of at least 32” and hardware usable with one hand, and no thresholds over half an inch.
- Temporary fixes: Polling places can use temporary fixes, including cones, portable ramps and temporary signs.
Even if the ADA were being followed to the letter, those requirements are not good enough, Crawford said.
“I would never go below four feet of width for a path of travel,” he told the Mississippi Free Press. “Because you need two people to be able to pass side-by-side, you know. The technical thing is you need to have a 36” wide path of travel, but that is not sufficient in my view. And so the ADA itself has limitations. It’s not the perfect document we all want it to be.”
Jane Walton Carroll, the communications director at the Jackson-based Disability Rights Mississippi, told the Mississippi Free Press that her organization seeks to monitor these issues around the state.
“We monitor for accessibility at polling sites and have been all over the state in the last several years. It’s something that is certainly a challenge we’ve found. Some polling locations are doing their best, but a lot of times, especially in more rural areas, they’re working with a fire station or something that was not originally set up to be a polling location. Inevitably, there’s going to be problems.”
She pointed specifically to issues with polling places across the state not providing signage giving voters information on curbside voting, nor stationing any election workers outside polling places to offer it.
“Curbside voting is something that someone with a disability has a right to, if that’s the most accessible means for them to vote,” Carroll said. “People might assume that that was more of a COVID-era thing, but curbside voting is supposed to be available, and there’s supposed to be signage of how to contact someone inside to come out to offer it.”
Crawford raised another issue: Not all polling places ensure that accessible voting machines are available to use, such as the Express Vote machines Hinds County uses to make it easier for people who are visually impaired or otherwise physically disabled to cast their ballots.
“I found a particular precinct once where they had plugged the accessible voting machine into a non-working outlet. … I was not happy,” he said. “The problem with waiting to set it up until someone shows up who needs it is that those Express Vote machines take time to get up and running. I waited around 30 minutes and it still wasn’t working.”
Watson: Ensuring ADA Compliance is Local Job
In an interview with Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson in October 2024, the secretary told the Mississippi Free Press that it is the job of county supervisors to select polling places and to ensure they are ADA-compliant.
“Our supervisors are the ones that locate those precincts, so I will tell you, if I were a supervisor, that’s a big deal: making sure our precincts are prepared and ready. So I think it’s incumbent upon them to make sure they’re checking things out,” the state’s Republican elections chief said on Oct. 21, 2024, referring to the 2023 issue at the Hinds County polling site. “That shouldn’t be found the day before. That should’ve been done earlier.”
Jane Watson Carroll told the Mississippi Free Press that, while local election officials do have a duty to ensure ADA compliance, she believes “the buck stops with the Secretary of State.”
“If we are not able to rectify a situation, we try to get in touch with the secretary of state. But it is our hope that all parties involved—whether it’s the circuit clerk, election commission, a poll manager or Secretary of State—would be working together to make sure people are able to vote accessibly as is their right.”
After the 2024 election, the Mississippi Free Press submitted records requests to seven counties that the publication’s analysis identified as counties likely to have significant populations voting in churches, which, as religious nonprofits, are not required to adhere to ADA requirements. The focus counties included DeSoto, Hinds, Lauderdale, Madison, Pike, Rankin and Warren counties.
The requests the Mississippi Free Press sent counties after the 2024 elections asked for documentation showing that county officials had inspected and ensured their polling places adhered to ADA requirements. None of those counties were able to provide that documentation.
“I was unable to locate any records responsive to the request. I do believe it has been considered, but I cannot find any documentation to that effect,” Madison County Election Commission Attorney Greg Higganbotham told the Mississippi Free Press last year. “… But we do take polling place accessibility seriously with the right to vote and all of that. If there are issues, we will address them; we consider the right to vote important.”
The Mississippi Free Press has submitted additional records requests seeking documentation of efforts to ensure ADA accessibility at polling locations for the 2026 elections and will report on those documents after receiving them.
Greta Kemp Martin, who previously served as the director of Disability Rights Mississippi, told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 26, 2026, that the organization often had difficulty getting information from local officials about polling place inspections for ADA compliance.
“That’s why we finally sent people to polling places—we took a survey and went and we sent people to those polling places that had complaints and took pictures,” she said.
Churches Often Lack Resources to Meet ADA Requirements
In Mississippi, churches made up about 18% of all polling places statewide, roughly in line with the national figure of about one-fifth, a Christianity Today analysis found. Since religious institutions are exempt from ADA regulations, that means that using churches as polling sites can particularly pose accessibility challenges.
Dr. Mitchell Brown, an expert on election administration at Auburn University, told the Mississippi Free Press in 2024 that election officials often choose churches as polling places because “it’s really hard to find good precinct polling places.”
In the absence of more government-funded buildings designated specifically for precinct polling, churches often have facilities that are available on Election Day and provide the space needed to conduct an election.
“At the time it was written, ADA drafters thought religious institutions would be inherently motivated to be welcoming,” Scott Crawford told the Mississippi Free Press on Oct. 26. “Unfortunately, decades later, that often means a ramp to get in a door and not much else. Wheelchair cutouts are often missing (from curbs) and accessible restrooms are rare to find unless the church is brand new.”
He added that there “is a lot of concern about smaller churches and rural churches having the resources” to retrofit their buildings to accommodate voters with disabilities.
“I don’t want to blame the churches because they’re nonprofits,” he added. “They don’t have a lot of money. I wish, in an ideal world, we had federal funding to create polling places that were fully ADA compliant without any retrofits—without any temporary ramps, because those just don’t work.”
Jane Walton Carroll told the Mississippi Free Press that Disability Rights Mississippi has identified problems at church polling places over the years.
“I don’t want to single out any one entity as being the problem, but there have been some churches that I’ve personally monitored that have been definitely not accessible, because they’re not required to be as accessible on a daily basis,” she said.
Greta Kemp Martin said that when she led DRMS, she also frequently saw problems with church polling places, but noted that they were “the most likely to go and get the temporary ramps.”
“A lot of times churches were more open to our suggestions for changes. They really wanted, it seemed, to try to make it as accessible as possible. I remember one pastor telling me, ‘You know, I have an elderly section of my congregation, so this would be helpful for them anyway,’” she recalled. “So a lot of churches, if they did have a problem, would try to fix it.”
“But in some cases, we would have a church where they put the polling place in the back in the fellowship hall, and you’d have a gravel walkway to the fellowship hall. That’s not ADA,” she continued. “You can’t get a wheelchair or some mobility devices across that. So with the stuff like that, they’d tell us, ‘We can’t fix it, and nobody gives us additional funds to fix it.’ So we would talk to them about potentially moving the polling place to the main building.”
Ahead of the 2024 election, the Mississippi Free Press asked voters in the seven focus counties to observe their polling places for ADA accessibility and submit surveys sharing their results. The following map details their responses.
Carroll told the Mississippi Free Press that she wants to “encourage people who don’t have a disability or don’t have someone in their lives with a disability to walk through in your mind the voting experience.”
“That’s driving to your polling place, finding parking, making it inside, accessing a voting machine—all of those things—and now imagine you have a mobility impairment or you have a visual impairment,” she said. “… I think it’s always helpful to just put yourself in someone’s shoes and look at it from a different perspective.”
“And even if you don’t have a disability and that’s not something you’re typically thinking of, if you’re out and about at your local polling place and notice, ‘Hey, that ramp doesn’t have a railing,’ or there’s only stairs to get inside—if you notice something like that, you can call our hotline at Disability Rights Mississippi,” she added. “It’s open all day on Election Day and we really want to hear about it so we can hopefully make voting more accessible for all Mississippians.”
You can contact the DRMS hotline at 800-722-4057.
Readers may also send tips about polling place accessibility issues or any other problems at the polls on Election Day to the Mississippi Free Press at voting@mississippifreepress.org.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ Trusted Elections Coverage and read past stories here.
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