Kate Larose will not be able to participate in Vermont’s Town Meeting Day.

Vermont is home to one of the oldest and most cherished forms of local election in the country: town meetings, a day-long form of deliberative democracy that reads as the antidote to authoritarianism. It’s the kind of American tradition the White House seems to be at war with.

Every first Tuesday of March, Vermonters participate in their local town’s elections via floor votes, long conducted entirely in person in states that adopt the practice.

Larose’s request to mark her votes at home was rejected; so was that of her husband, who has a debilitating case of Long Covid. For this crucial annual event, there’s little oversight on whether towns’ accommodation process complies with disability and voting access laws.

“There are towns right now in Vermont that are voting on making sure that essentially, unhoused people can’t exist in their town,” said Larose, a youth services coordinator with the Vermont Center for Independent Living. “And I can’t vote [against] that.”

Town meeting days are a New England tradition, most prevalent in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as some towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut. They predate all disability civil rights laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act—which can be painfully clear to disabled........

© Mother Jones