If You Want To Vote In Miami-Dade County, You're Going To Need Excellent Bladder Control

So let's say you are a well-populated county (just go with it, please) and people express concern that the bathrooms available at your polling places -- where people sometimes wait for HOURS to vote -- are not sufficiently accessible to those with disabilities. Do you (a) retrofit the existing bathrooms to ensure accessibility? (b) build new accessible bathrooms? (c) close ALL the bathrooms at polling places so you don't have to address the accessibility issue? If you are Miami-Dade County, you pick (c) because what the hell is wrong with you?

Earlier this year, the Miami-Dade County Elections Department quietly implemented a policy to close the bathrooms at all polling facilities, according to disability rights lawyer Marc Dubin. Dubin said the policy change was in “direct response” to an inquiry to the Elections Department about whether they had assessed accessibility of polling place bathrooms to those with disabilities. [...]

Instead, he received a written response announcing that the county would close all restrooms at polling places “to ensure that individuals with disabilities are not treated unfairly,” a January email stated. “[T]he Department’s policy is not to permit access to restrooms at polling sites on election days,” Assistant County Attorney Shanika Graves said in a Feb. 14 email.

Is this real life? You made a policy that you will not HAVE BATHROOMS AVAILABLE at polling places? An actual factual policy? That you made some poor assistant county attorney write about? And said assistant county attorney probably went home and guzzled antifreeze, because that is such a bullshit thing to have to tell people?

Let's take a moment to remember that in the 2012 elections, some voters waited in line for eight hours to vote in Miami-Dade County. Most people do not typically go eight hours without bathroom breaks, and not everyone is going to suffer the humiliation of pants wetting, the bulkiness of Depends, or the difficulty of a catheter just to cast a fucking ballot. We know that you're trying to make sure the browns and the blahs and the poors and the disabled can't vote, but christ, make it a little less obvious.

[ Think Progress / Miami Herald ]