Voted - with help, grr....

[davidgillon]

First time at new polling station at Balfour Road school (I refused to vote for PCC*). I took the chair just to make sure I looked at the access practicalities.

It would have been a nightmare to walk to, impossible to wheel to (down a very steep hill, then up the other side), just as well I can drive again. It does at least have offstreet parking, which neither of previous two polling stations did (they had similar hill problems).

If they've got disabled spaces in the parking I couldn't see them.

There was a ramp, but poorly signed.

Someone held the door for me going in (more on this in a moment)

Internal signage was poor.

They did have a wheelchair height booth, but they'd divided the hall in two lengthwise with benches and the last one neatly lined up with the front of the wheelchair accessible booth, you definitely wouldn't have gotten a large power chair in there, and it made the approach awkward for a standard sized manual wheelchair.

A teller asked me how the access was, and I suspect from context that meant I was the first wheelchair voter they'd had, at 3:30PM. That's worrying. I told them about signage and the bench issue and she seemed to be headed for the bench when I wheeled out.

When I got to the outside doors again they were shut, heavy, and only opened inward. I can open a heavy door in the chair, but that forces you to come at the doorway at an angle, and the footplates on the chair therefore went straight into the pillar outside, absolutely no way I was getting out on my own. Two women following me out tried to open the other door, it was locked shut - they opened two bolts and it still wouldn't move, fortunately with one of them holding the door I could back off and come straight at it, but the overall conclusion has to be that I couldn't independently access the polling station, which isn't good.


*PCC= Police and Crime Commissioner - for non-Brits these are newly introduced, politicising the former Police Authorities,  many people, including me, opposed the change and felt voting would legitimise them. I otherwise always vote, but this was a rare occasion in which not voting was a valid form of political expression.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Those access barriers are disheartening.

Also awful is seeing the "get the story first" obsession with exit polls. I hope that the exit poll results are, at least, not announced before the vote itself closes.

Sleep as well as you can.

[davidgillon]

. I hope that the exit poll results are, at least, not announced before the vote itself closes.

ISTR that it's actually illegal to publicise exit polls before the poll closes, but I'm not 100% on that.