The upcoming general election for the State of Maryland is November 8, 2022!

Polling places will be open from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm and are required to provide reasonable accommodations to voters with disabilities. You can find DRM’s Voter Rights and Voting Action Plan on our website.

Election Protection Hotlines are open before and during election day:

ENGLISH 866-OUR-VOTE 866-687-8683

SPANISH/ENGLISH 888-VE-Y-VOTA 888-839-8682

ASIAN LANGUAGES/ENGLISH 888-API-VOTE 888-274-8683

ARABIC/ENGLISH 844-YALLA-US 844-925-5287

DRM wants to hear from you whether your polling site was accessible, whether election judges provided accommodations, whether you had any problems with the voting machines, or anything else on your mind. Email your comments to Voting@DisabilityRightsMD.org or call us at 443-692-2492.

DRM participated in the 2022 Candidates for Governor Forum for Marylanders with Disabilities, a livestreamed event held on October 4. Over 700 people attended to hear from the official Republican and Democratic candidates for governor, Dan Cox and Wes Moore, speak about issues important to disability communities. DRM’s Voting Rights Advocate, Samuela Ansah presented on voting rights for Marylanders with disabilities during the forum.

You can view the forum including Samuela’s presentation on YouTube.

DRM Advocate Audrey Sellers and Attorney Gabriel Rubinstein launched a social media campaign, #WheresMyRide, over the summer to raise awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities who rely on the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) MobilityLink paratransit service. These challenges include extremely long waits for rides and onboard times, stranded riders, and ride cancellations, preventing riders from accessing critical medical services and other key activities in the community.

MTA recently reported that on-time performance has rebounded from a low of on-time performance at 59.2 percent in September 2021 to 92.6 percent in September 2022, just under its target on-time performance of 93.5 percent. MTA has also secured an additional contractor for vehicle operation and increased the number of drivers from between 300 and 400 to over 1,000.

Notably, MobilityLink ridership is down significantly from pre-pandemic levels, likely contributing to the increase in on-time performance. DRM will continue to pay very close attention to whether the service consistently shows strong performance as ridership increases.

DRM hosted its second Back to School Disability Rights Fair at the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI) in Baltimore City on October 12. Attendees received information and resources for families with students with disabilities. Thanks to our KKI partners people with disabilities who needed accommodations to receive their COVID vaccine were vaccinated on site with the necessary accommodations.  Stay tuned for details on DRM’s next fair.

DRM is excited to launch a new accessibility feature for our website located on the ‘Accessibility and Language Options’ button at the top of our landing page. The feature allows website visitors to change the format of our website pages to make it easier to access information. Visitors can change the font, font size, language (including when playing audio), line height, plain text, color, mask screen, and much more. These features can be used on mobile devices and any documents opened from the site. Click here to visit DRM’s website and try it.