by KYW’s Mike Dunn
Two months before the April Presidential primary in Pennsylvania, officials here in Philadelphia are struggling to make polling places more accessible to the handicapped.
Goaded by lawsuits, elections officials in Philadelphia now have all but about 200 of the city's 1,600 polling places accessible to the handicapped. Adapting the remainder, though, is proving difficult.
At a city council hearing, Bob Lee of the City Commissioner's office testified that the litigation has forced them to look at moving polls outside of a division:
"One of the moves was to move a polling place from the 38th ward to the 52nd ward, which meant you'd have had to walk through Fairmount Park, go down across Kelley Drive, swim the Schuylkill, cross the Schuylkill expressway. So that's the difficulty that we've been having."
But Lee says moving polling places is kept at a minimum. Retro-fitting existing locations, to make them ADA compliant is difficult, particularly because of the need to offer parking for ParaTransit vans.
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