'Functional Disenfranchisement from the Process': Why the Iowa Caucuses Should Be Canceled
NewsPolitics
Image: AP
DES MOINES, Iowa—It’s a supreme irony that in the United States, we kick off our presidential election season with an undemocratic process that essentially disenfranchises large segments of the voting public. The Iowa caucuses—which take place Monday night and require voters to spend several hours at a specific location to publicly choose a candidate with their fellow caucus goers—are, as many critics have put it, a de facto form of voter suppression. There’s a reason that in 2016, only 16 percent of Iowa’s voters took part in a caucus.
For instance: Have a baby at home? Good luck finding childcare so you can go attend your caucus. As Lyz Lenz recently observed, “100 years after the 19th Amendment was passed, Iowa’s mothers are still effectively disenfranchised from caucusing.” But it’s not just parents with young children at home who have to surmount barriers in order to participate in a caucus. The process can exclude everyone from people who work in the evenings—who often tend to be people in retail jobs or other low-wage work—to people who can’t afford childcare, to people with disabilities, who may show up at a site only to find out it’s not accessible.
“Truly, caucusing is ‘Iowa Nice’ voter suppression,” Reyma McCoy McDeid, the Executive Director of Central Iowa Center for Independent Living and a long-time disability rights advocate, told Jezebel. While the Iowa Democratic Party has taken belated steps to make the caucuses more accessible, McCoy McDeid believes those efforts are insufficient, pointing to the party’s wait in hiring a staffer devoted to accessibility until days before the caucuses are to take place. One voter, she noted, who submitted an accommodation request for transportation to his caucus site as well as his need for a chair to sit in, was merely told to bring a “tailgating” chair with him. “I’d argue that, even with the future of the caucuses in question, the parties are still choosing to not take accessibility seriously,” she said.
Jezebel spoke with a number of Iowa Democratic voters who either want to caucus but can’t, or have had to scramble to make plans in order to participate. As Harleigh Boldridge, a health care organizer who requested a disability accommodation, put it, the caucuses are “designed for wealthy people who can afford child care or can take time off.”
“Accessibility isn’t just a disability issue, it’s also a person of color issue,” she said. “It affects anyone who doesn’t fit what the Iowa Democratic Party currently values as its voters.”
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Paula Findley Linnevold, 71, Social Worker
We had to make a decision between my husband or me going to the caucus. I’m going to go caucus, after working a 10-hour day. This is because of a major loss in hours of care for our adult daughter with disabilities due to privatization of Medicaid in Iowa. We have no one to care for her on Monday night. We have lost 12 to 18 hours of care per week for our daughter—this in the last few years since the Republican governor approved privatization. Since then, I have had to cut down on my employment because our daughter is severely disabled and can’t be alone.
This is yet another example of the inaccessibilities that many families feel. My husband and I are both over 70 years old with a 50-year old, non-verbal daughter with autism and a seizure disorder. We feel like in Trump’s America we are expendable, like we don’t matter. We are lucky that we are mostly healthy and can still work—for now. If Social Security and Medicare are impacted, what will it mean for our daughter—and us too?
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