You say it. They carry it. They don’t change it.
That’s the whole deal between an AAC user and a communication partner. It’s simple, really: it doesn’t take special training or complicated rules. It just takes one thing: respecting the message exactly as it was given, and respecting the person behind it.
I’m a quadriplegic woman and an AAC user. I communicate by typing, letter by letter, in a text-based app, using head tracking and an onscreen keyboard. It is a slow accumulation of small, deliberate motions before a single sentence even exists. Every day, I hand those words to someone else and trust them to carry them faithfully, exactly as I built them. That trust is woven into almost everything I do.
So when I tell you what happened to me in a voting booth, I need you to understand: this isn’t only a voting story. It’s a story about what happens when that trust breaks.
The record
I’ve been eligible to vote for more than ten years. In that time, I’ve voted twice.
It wasn’t because I didn’t care. It was because voting, for me, starts with obstacles most people never have to think about, obstacles of access and of communication.
The first time, I went in person. Just leaving my house took real effort, the transfers, the planning, the small physical toll that most people never see or think about. Getting to the polling place was its own battle. Once I arrived, getting inside was another one:
- a step where there shouldn’t have been one,
- a door too heavy or too narrow,
- the particular strain of navigating a space that wasn’t built with a body like mine in mind.
I needed two people to help me, and I hated feeling like a burden to them. No one at that polling place had planned for someone like me. They’d simply assumed everything would work out.
The next time, I tried voting by mail, hoping I could do it from home, on my own terms. But I can’t physically mark a ballot myself. Someone has to do it for me, based on exactly what I tell them.
That’s not a favor; it’s my right. Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees people with disabilities the right to choose their own voting assistant. There are a few limits, but the point stands: I shouldn’t have to rely only on family or friends. Election officials should be providing trained, neutral helpers for disabled voters. That part of the system still needs to change.
This is the same thing I live every day as an AAC user. I create the message. Someone else carries it. They don’t get to change it.
What happened in the booth
I made my choice in a judge’s race. The family member who helped me looked at it and said, out loud, in a voice that carried further than I wanted it to: “Why are you voting for that candidate? He’s an idiot. You should vote for the other one.”
There was a beat of silence after that. The kind where you can hear the room, the pens scratching at other tables, the low hum of the machines. In that silence, I understood exactly what was happening.
Let’s be honest about what that was. It wasn’t help, it was coercion. Their only job was to mark the choice I’d already made.
Anyone trained in AAC practice knows a communication partner has one role: to listen and to support the message exactly as it’s given. Never to judge it, and never to “fix” what they assume the person really meant. What happened to me in that booth broke that rule completely. And it happened in a place where almost no one thinks to apply that rule at all.
That moment was supposed to protect my voice. Instead, someone tried to overrule it. It wasn’t just a violation of my communication rights; it was an attempt to interfere with my vote itself.
What it cost me
I stayed away for years after that. I built a quiet little routine: shrug it off, say I didn’t care, and move on. A script I could deliver without having to explain the real reason underneath it. It was easier than admitting the truth. That the one time I trusted someone to carry my choice, they argued with it instead. That single moment kept me out of elections I actually cared about for more than a decade.
Why I’m telling NWACS
This community understands something a lot of people don’t. Access isn’t only about having the right tool in your hands. It’s about whether the people around you treat your words as truly, fully yours.
A ballot marked by a helper. A sentence spoken through a device. A message relayed by an interpreter: it’s the same deal, every single time. You say it. They carry it. They don’t change it.
If you train communication partners, or you work alongside AAC users, please hear this:
Your job ends the moment you’ve passed along the message you were given.
Nothing else belongs to you to add.
And if you’re an AAC user reading this. If someone has ever questioned your message, changed it, or brushed it aside, even someone who was only supposed to carry it for you, what happened to you has a name. It’s called coercion – and it happens to disabled voters every election, dressed up as help. And it was never about you.
I still don’t know what voting will look like for me going forward. But I’m done pretending I don’t care.
My voice was mine in that booth. It’s mine everywhere else, too.
References
- Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act: U.S. Department of Justice (CIvil Rights Division): https://www.justice.gov/crt/statutes-enforced-voting-section
- AAC and communication-partner training: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/professional-issues/augmentative-and-alternative-communication/
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