The right to vote: Article 29 CRPD and disenfranchisement in Europe

Article 29 of the CRPD requires states to guarantee political rights and the opportunity to enjoy them on an equal basis with others. It has two halves, and both are usually needed for a person to actually vote.

The first is the right itself: no exclusion from the electorate. The second is the practical part, and the treaty text is unusually specific about it. Voting procedures, facilities and materials must be appropriate, accessible and easy to understand and use. That phrase is the direct treaty basis for easy-to-read election information, and it is one of the few places where the Convention effectively names a format requirement.

Disenfranchisement through guardianship

The historical pattern across Europe is that placement under guardianship removed the right to vote automatically, without any assessment of whether the person could form a political preference. In some states the removal was written into the constitution.

The CRPD Committee’s position is that this is not permitted in any form. Its view in Bujdosó and others v. Hungary, an individual communication decided in 2013, was that Article 29 does not allow any restriction of the right to vote on the basis of disability, including a restriction based on an individualised assessment of capacity. The Committee’s reasoning follows directly from Article 12: if legal capacity cannot be removed on the basis of disability, neither can the rights that depend on it.

The European Court of Human Rights reached a narrower conclusion by a different route. In Alajos Kiss v. Hungary it held that an automatic, blanket removal of voting rights from everyone under partial guardianship, without individual judicial evaluation, violated the right to free elections. That judgment left space for an individualised assessment, which is precisely where the two bodies diverge.

The result across the EU is a patchwork. Several member states have abolished the link entirely, sometimes by constitutional court ruling, sometimes by legislation, and their electorates grew by tens of thousands overnight. Others have replaced automatic exclusion with a judicial assessment, satisfying the Strasbourg standard while remaining, on the Committee’s reading, in breach of the Convention. A small number retain broader restrictions.

What accessibility means on election day

Removing the legal bar produces a voter. It does not produce a vote. The barriers that come next are mundane and well documented.

The polling station. Steps, heavy doors, no accessible toilet, a booth too narrow for a wheelchair, a shelf at the wrong height. Where an accessible station exists, it is often not the one the voter is registered for, and reassignment requires a request nobody publicised.

The ballot paper. Small type, dense layout, no tactile template for blind voters, and a design that assumes reading fluency. Tactile ballot templates exist and are cheap; they are not universally provided.

Assistance. Whether a voter may bring a person of their own choosing, and whether that person may be a support worker or must be a family member, varies between systems and is often decided at the door by an official reading an unclear rule.

Information. Party programmes, the ballot itself and the procedure explained in easy-to-read. Some electoral commissions now produce this as standard; many still rely on disability organisations to do it unfunded, which means it appears late or not at all.

Residential settings. Voters living in institutions and care homes depend on the facility to organise access, mobile ballot boxes or postal voting. Where that is left to staff discretion, turnout in those settings collapses, and the failure is invisible in national statistics.

Why the campaigns focused on this

Voting rights became a central campaign issue for European disability organisations before the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections, and the argument was strategic as much as principled. A group that cannot vote is a group that politicians have no electoral reason to consider. Every other item on this site, from independent living to accessible services, competes for budget in a process from which some of the people affected had been formally removed.