There’s only about a month left until the Midterms, and organizations around the country are gearing up to mobilize their communities to show up at the polls on voting day. Are you ready to Get Out the Vote? Tune in to the following webinars to learn more about voter mobilization and voters with disabilities!

On Thursday, October 11th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, Nonprofit Vote will host the final webinar of their Midterms series on strategies and messaging on GOTV for nonprofits. Attend this webinar to learn how your nonprofit can effectively engage in nonprofit Get Out the Vote tactics to mobilize your community. Sign up for this webinar over at Nonprofit Vote.

On Tuesday, October 16th at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, the Great Lakes ADA Center will be hosting “The Right to Vote: Access for People with Disabilities“. During this webinar, Michelle Bishop of the National Disability Rights Network will discuss the status of accessibility of the voting process for people with disabilities. Attendees do have the option of earning 1.5 credit hours of Continuing Education Recognition.

On Thursday, October 18th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, the American Association of People with Disabilities’ REV UP Campaign will host “Breaking Barriers to Voting”. This webinar, which is produced in collaboration with DOnetwork, will discuss navigating polling place barriers for people with disabilities and give attendees an opportunity to ask questions and get answers on their accessibility concerns.

NCIL is proud to announce the 2018 GOTV (Get Out the Vote) Guide is now available! This newly updated guide now includes information to help organizations and individuals plan and implement a GOTV strategy through phone banking, text banking, and social media. The guide includes information on messaging, best practices, and toolkits available to help you encourage your consumers, members, friends, and family to vote.

The 2018 midterm elections have already shown to be critical, with many underdog candidates winning their primaries in surprising upsets. GOTV efforts are a way for people with disabilities to make a difference in local, state, and national elections, often from their homes.

To view the GOTV Guide and other useful election-related materials, go to www.ncil.org/votingrights. If you have any questions about this guide, please email NCIL Disability Vote Organizer Sarah Blahovec at [email protected].

On September 25th, Generation Progress, a section of the Center for American Progress, published “A Generation without Representation: How Young People are Severely Underrepresented Among Legislators.” This report examines the representation gap between the 62 million American Millennials who were of voting age during the 2016 election and older generations, and found that although young people are 34% of the electorate, they make up only 6% of legislators.   [Read more…]

Happy National Voter Registration Day! Have you registered to vote, or checked to make sure that your voter registration is current and active?

If you’re a person with a disability, it may be more difficult to check your voter registration than it is for non-disabled voters. Reports have shown that most states’ online voter registration systems are inaccessible.

Around the country, advocates like you are educating their election officials about the importance of making all parts of the voting process, including registration, accessible to voters with disabilities. But we still have so much work to do, and we need YOUR help to accomplish it. Register to vote today, and then donate to NCIL’s Voting Rights Fund to ensure we can continue this important work through the midterm elections and beyond.

• Register to vote
• Donate to NCIL’s Voting Rights Fund

Did you vote in your last election? If not, you’re not alone.

Over two million people with disabilities didn’t vote in 2016, and this isn’t just an issue of voter apathy. Study after study shows that our voting system is still inaccessible.

NCIL wants to help YOU vote.

Today marks two months until the mid-term elections. This is your chance to elect representatives on all levels of government that understand the interests and priorities of the disability community. Will you make a donation to NCIL’s Voting Rights Fund today to help ensure that you have an accessible way to vote in November?

Yes! I will chip in $25 to help make our democracy accessible to all.

Last Tuesday, NCIL Disability Vote Organizer Sarah Blahovec joined Muthoni Wambu Kraal, Vice President of National Outreach and Training at EMILY’s List, to discuss NCIL’s “Including People with Disabilities in Your Political Campaign: A Guide for Campaign Staff.” Discussing why NCIL wrote the guide, Blahovec said “we want to proactively encourage campaigns to become accessible…but we also wanted to give people with disabilities a resource to go campaigns that they want to work for and say ‘here, this can be done.” You can watch the captioned replay of the live stream on Facebook.