As San Franciscans head to the polls this week, one nonprofit has been working nonstop to ensure that blind and visually impaired voters in The City aren’t overlooked when casting their ballots.
From its mid-Market headquarters, Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, one of California’s oldest nonprofit organizations, has been registering voters and helping residents complete their mail-in ballots.
On Tuesday, the final day of voting in California’s primary election, the office will become an official polling place. Lighthouse leaders want to bring awareness to the obstacles that people with visual impairments face when voting and solve accessibility issues at and beyond the ballot box.
Lighthouse’s chief executive, Sharon Giovinazzo, joined the non-profit in October 2022 after leading the Arkansas-based World Services for the Blind for seven years. She lost her vision at 31 due to multiple sclerosis and began working in manufacturing, where she learned about accessible technologies.
“This was such a big platform to be able to try to make the world a little bit better,” Giovinazzo said of joining the nonprofit. “Throughout the blindness industry, we’re kind of the ones who set the example.”
Lighthouse was founded 122 years ago in the basement of the San Francisco Public Library by a group of women who organized what was then called the Reading Room for the Blind. Now, 40% of the nonprofit’s employees are blind, Giovinazzo said, though the number fluctuates with seasonal workers.
One of Lighthouse’s goals is to foster diversity within the visually impaired community. “One of our goals as an agency is to make sure that we’re not just reaching out to them just to say, ‘Hey, we have these services,’ but that there’s people who look like them, that talk like them, that understand their culture.”
“Whether that be AAPI, Latinx, the LGBTQIA+ community, whomever that is because there’s people who are blind in all of those communities,” she added. “We need to be open and have open arms for that.”
According to the Annual Disability Statistics Compendium, voters who are blind are substantially less likely to vote than those without disabilities.
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Marissa Slaughter, a grant specialist for Lighthouse, told The Examiner that data from the American Community Survey, which is part of the U.S. Census, showed that there are about 19,000 people in San Francisco who have trouble seeing. These can include people who are older and losing their vision, as well as people who have been blind since birth.
A confluence of factors disincentivizes voters with disabilities from casting ballots. Voters could walk into a polling place, assuming an accessible voting machine would be present, only to find paper ballots. Other sites could have a machine but have workers who don’t know how to use it.
“It’s our responsibility to be able to try to capture that data, as well, because not everybody is looking for that,” Giovinazzo said. “They lumped all disabilities into one kind of big pot.”
During her time in Arkansas, Giovinazzo trained poll workers to serve voters with disabilities so that volunteers didn’t panic when seeing a person with a guide dog or a white cane walk into a polling place.
“One of the things that I think that my staff is really, really good at — what we’re really good at as an agency — is listening to people,” Giovinazzo said. “What do you need? It’s not always what you want, but it’s what do you need?”
“As humans, we have to take care of those basic needs first, and this just happens to be one of them,” she added.
Lighthouse workers hope their efforts throughout this campaign cycle will inspire other agencies that serve blind or visually impaired residents to create more accessible polling places.
“We're an ever-evolving world at this point in time, and so these things are important,” Giovinazzo said. “It's important that our voices are heard for so many reasons beyond just a presidential or a senatorial or a mayoral race.
