Major Pollster Refuses to Count People with Disabilities

[KamaAina]

and amazingly, it's not (R)asmussen. :eyes:

http://www.ncil.org/resources/whamv8i32.html

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, one of the nation’s most prominent pollsters, is dedicated to providing valuable data representing the will of the people, that is unless you happen to be a person with a disability. NCIL (National Council on Independent Living -Ed.) has submitted a request to Pew Research Center to include disability statistics in their polling so that the voice of the disability community can be factored into the national political dialogue. Those requests have been flatly rejected, and the message is clear that people with disabilities don’t count.

This outrageous unwillingness to include people with disabilities in their polling is narrow-minded, and delegitimizes the work done at Pew. The power of the disability vote is of significant consequence in America, and to omit disability statistics from the national conversation is both unethical and dishonest. People with disabilities are a major constituency and a swing voting bloc. The disability vote went for George W. Bush in 2004 (a million apologies -Ed.) , and Barack Obama in 2008. Furthermore, a GAO study found that 14.7 million people with disabilities voted in the last presidential election despite inaccessible conditions at over a quarter of the nation’s polling places. The disability vote is almost as much as the African-American vote, 50% larger than the Latino vote, and many times more than the Jewish vote. Do we count now?

If you are mad, you should be. While all of these other constituencies are well-represented in polls, discrimination still prevents people with disabilities from being considered in American political life. Blatant discrimination will not stand, and with the support of our members and allies, NCIL will fight the idea that people with disabilities should remain invisible.

[CreekDog]

1. Are they throwing out answers provided by disabled participants in their polls? No

sounds like they aren't providing a breakout of numbers of the disabled participants.

well, that's a lot different.

unrecommended.

but GO GIANTS! :D

[KamaAina]

2. How could they throw them out

if they don't even know who we are?

Any pollster worth his/her salt gives a breakdown of African American, Latino, senior citizen, youth voters, etc. Why not us?

[11cents]

3. The article and headline are outrageously misleading.

[Motown_Johnny]

4. maybe disabled persons tend to vote more in line with their ethnic or age group

and that trying to lump them together would be misleading.



The two examples given in the post are simply that the candidates who got the most votes got the most disabled persons votes. This isn't a very persuading argument.



If you can provide some statistical evidence that a person's disability is determinative in his or her vote then I will agree with you that a separate demographic is required.

[Gormy Cuss]

7. It's a good question, KamaAina

and it appears that Pew has compared disabled voters to the general population at least once in the past
See here:
http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=196

I'll try to find some direct answer on the Pew page as to why they won't consider a disability breakdown. I suspect that it may be an issue of too small an n to report separately in a typical RDD survey with 1000 respondents.

However, it seems to me that from a policy standpoint checking the assumptions on similarities and differences of disabled voters to the general population is something worth doing at least once each every two years. Adding a quota for disabled voters in an RDD survey is feasible, but it would cost more money. Every time a new quota group is add it costs money because it requires churning through more sample to find eligible respondents.

[KamaAina]

14. Too small an N to report?

Estimates of the number of Americans living with disabilities range from one in six (N = 167) to one in five (N = 200).

[Gormy Cuss]

16. Too small of a n among respondents.

Not n in the population. In an RDD survey without specific quota groups it's possible to have under representation of groups to such an extent that even weighting wouldn't generate a valid estimate.

eta: not only possible but expected that some groups will be under represented and therefore should not be reported separately. That's why I wrote earlier about adding a quota group to identify the disabled in sufficient numbers to be generalizable.

[REP]

5. I'm disabled, and this doesn't bother me at all

I don't see why my disability (in my case, kidney failure and a weird form of arthritis) trumps everything else about me - gender, age etc.

[KamaAina]

6. It doesn't "trump everything else about you"

indeed, in independent living, we explicitly do not allow our disabilities to define us.

BUT it does give you a vested interest in issues like health care reform, Social Security, etc.

[REP]

8. Being alive gives me a vested interest in those things! Not being fucked up!

The only thing I do explicitly as a disabled person is park.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. I haven't gotten there yet

But there is a point in actually counting disabled...

[KamaAina]

13. "Fucked up"?!

Ouch. That's the way society, the medical profession in particular, wants you to view yourself. Come into the light!

http://www.svilc.org/mission_History.htm

SVILC (my employer -Ed.) is a cross-disability, intergenerational, and multicultural disability justice organization that creates fully inclusive communities that value the dignity, equality, freedom and worth of every human being. We do this by building disability identity, culture and pride; creating opportunities for personal and community transformation; and partnering with others to ensure that civil and human rights are protected.

[REP]

20. If you saw my xrays or creat/pro ratio, you'd agree - fucked up

No amount of euphemism will hide that I have a disease that will kill me. I don't mind being called crip, fucked up, whatever because parts of me are :)

[sam sarrha]

10. i'm not Disabled.. i can prove it by kicking his ass with my one good fist

[Odin2005]

11. OK, This REALLY pisses me off!

:grr:

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

17. No offense

But you realize you say that every other thread, right?

[Odin2005]

21. Sorry, there is so much outrageous stuff it's hard to get creative with the responses.

:shrug:

[lightningandsnow]

12. Thanks for posting this!

K+R!

[EFerrari]

15. K&R for visibility.

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

18. That means they won't count RimJob

Yeah, I went there.

[McCamy Taylor]

19. Um....they count them. They do not distinguish them. Big difference,

How many demographic variables are necessary when doing a political poll?

[KamaAina]

22. Candidates rely on those breakouts when deciding which voters to target

an egregious example currently is NutMeg Whitman pandering to Latinos by literally saying one thing in Spanish and another in English.

Without this polling data, how are candidates going to pander to us? :shrug:

[Codeine]

23. Man, that's the most misleading headline I've seen in a while.

Unrec just on that account. Damn.