BALTIMORE -- Lou Ann Blake was shocked when she learned she was blind.
“My biggest fear was that people would tell me that I couldn’t do stuff,” she said.
She loved horseback riding and was afraid people would say it was unsafe. She feared being unable to drive.
Now the director of programs at the National Federation of the Blind, headquartered in Baltimore, Blake, 63, has retinitis pigmentosa, which led to the loss of most of her vision in her early 30s.
In the beginning, she lived her life as though she were not blind. That changed after hearing a law professor blame a crime committed by a young man on his parents’ blindness.
“The fact that his parents were blind had nothing to do with the fact that he committed a crime,” she said. “I realized at that moment that I needed to be with people like me.”
Blake has carried that identification into her role at NFB, the advocacy group for the blind started in 1940.
One of her most influential projects has been protecting voting rights for the blind.
Blake said blind voters are not treated equally when they cast their ballots in person.
Blind voters can cast their ballots in person during early voting and on Nov. 8 using paper ballots or ballot-marking devices, Blake said.
Ballot-marking devices use a control pad and headphones to narrate the ballot. Blake said the current system violates blind voters’ privacy and anonymity. While the ballot-marking device allows blind voters to vote independently, it prints a long, skinny ballot, which differs from the traditional one and could allow blind voters’ ballots to be identified, she said.
Blake played a key role in a 2021 lawsuit that pushed Maryland to change these practices. The state agreed to pay $230,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by NFB and blind voters alleging that the state’s electronic voting devices were undermining voter confidentiality and violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Blake said she helped negotiate parts of the settlement, including that the state must pay NFB $2,000 to produce an instructional video for poll workers. The video, titled “Empowering the Blind Voter,” can be seen on YouTube.
The state also agreed to install two ballot-marking devices in at least half of all polling sites, invite all voters to use them and ensure that at least 10 do so.
All Maryland polling places during early voting and Election Day will have at least two ballot-marking devices, said Nikki Charlson, deputy administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections.
Data from the 2022 primary election shows that 33.6% of voters who voted in person used a ballot-marking device to make their selections, she added.
Even so, Ronza Othman, president of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland, said the total number of blind voters in Maryland is unknown because disclosure of a disability is not a requirement to vote.
Joel Zimba, of Oakenshawe, said he is certain his votes have been identified by poll judges when he used the ballot-marking device because he is the only blind voter in his neighborhood. He said the election board releases data on the number of people who use the ballot-marking device at each polling place.
Zimba wants the state to require everyone to use the ballot-marking devices. About two years ago when he voted at Margaret Brent Elementary in Charles Village, the ballot-marking device was down, he said. Instead of five minutes, it took him about 45 minutes to vote because the poll worker struggled to set up the machine.
Blake said NFB will lobby the Maryland General Assembly next year to permit those overseas, those in the military and the disabled to return their ballots electronically.
The Americans with Disability Act requires those with disabilities to be given equal opportunities to vote, said Jessica Weber, a lawyer at the Baltimore-based law firm Brown, Goldstein & Levy who represented NFB in the 2021 lawsuit.
States that allow voters with a disability to return their ballots electronically include Colorado, Massachusetts, Utah, Washington and West Virginia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Blake is originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Now she lives in Federal Hill. She graduated with an engineering degree from Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology in 1982. She studied law at Widener University Delaware Law School in Wilmington.
Before her current role at NFB, her other positions included research specialist and project manager. She joined NFB in 2005.
She spent a month receiving training at the Louisiana Center for the Blind, where she learned skills, such as cooking and traveling. Preparing a meal for 30 people was a requirement for graduation.
“I benefited a lot from that,” she said. “[Being blind] is something that people have to come to terms with in their own time.”
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