The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) clarifies that persons with disabilities have the right to participate in political life and enshrines their right to vote and stand as candidates in elections. This article evaluates compliance and current practices in the European Union, finding a great variety of implementation to facilitate the electoral participation of persons with disabilities. Despite CRPD ratification by all EU member states, inaccessibility of elections, lack of suitable information, removal of legal capacity, and other disability-based discrimination remain barriers to political participation. Nevertheless, there are increasingly good practices of inclusion by which legislators and election administrators can learn from each other. Based on the example of the EU, the judicial activism of disabled persons organisations in particular highlights the key role of civil society organisations and their cooperation with public authorities to make electoral processes more inclusive, alleviating political inequality overall.
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Rabitsch et al. (2023) studied this question.