This report considers best practices aimed at supporting the participation of citizens with disabilities in elections in the European Union (EU) with a particular focus on France and Italy as case studies. It discusses the existing practices based on an extensive literature review of existing research. More specifically, by drawing on existing research, it addresses the potential attitudinal and environmental barriers that shape the interactions that citizens with disabilities have with the electoral environment. It focuses explicitly on how citizens’ interactions with the physical and social environment can either have a positive or negative impact on the interactions of citizens with disabilities in the electoral environment.
The report concludes with a series of recommendations, including (but not limited to):
- Consider invisible disabilities.
- Where possible, reasonable adjustments that safeguard the independence and secrecy of voting should be favoured such as providing Braille templates that can be placed over the ballot paper to cast the vote, rather than enable a blind voter to be assisted by another person in casting their vote.
- Extend flexible voting arrangements to citizens with mental health-related disabilities, as Ireland has done through its Electoral Reform Act (2022).
- A common standard of measures should be adopted which will be used to assess both the extent to which inequalities exist in citizens’ access to the vote and the effectiveness of any solutions taken in order to reduce those inequalities.
- A key recommendation is to consider ways of co-creating or developing bottom-up approaches to research.