The challenges faced by people with special needs in electoral processes are multiple and quite specific. Reduced accessibility to information disseminated by the media or political parties, limited accessibility in polling stations and in public institutions are just a few of them, said Victor Koroli, director of the INFONET Alliance, during an IPN debate on Wednesday.

Referring specifically to the November 5 elections, Victor Koroli cited recent studies showing that only under one percent of polling stations are accessible to people with special needs. “About a hundred public buildings were evaluated during the pre-election period, most of them being polling stations. We must realize that changes do not exist, changes for the better do not exist. Our explanation is at one point that things are left to the local administration of level one. They typically have very little money”. Victor Koroli says that currently there is no general concept, a national accessibility plan, including the allocation of funds. “Rural communities in particular have a big problem in ensuring accessibility in this context”, he noted.

The executive director of the INFONET Alliance declares that people with special needs also encounter difficulties in accessing information of public interest in electoral campaigns. “We found, for example, that four national televisions broadcast debates. Only two of them had interpretation in the mimic-gestural language”, however, he says, “none of them complied with decision 284 of September 2, 2022 of the Audiovisual Council, which obliges them as in debates, during the electoral period, during the period of maximum interest, the interpreter’s hands and face should appear on a third of the screen. In this respect, I would like to illustrate with a good practice that was ensured by the company Privesc.eu during the live broadcasts from the CEC hall, which complied with this rule and showed a model of how this can happen. We also have to mention that the Central Electoral Commission did this, the video spots it made, so it gave the interpreter a third of the screen”, said Victor Koroli.

He went on to bring up another topic related to the situation and attitude of the political parties. “We took steps to access information of public interest on the addresses of the electoral competitors and requested very clear information: how many party members you have on January 1, 2023, how many of them are disabled people, what is the amount of funds you plan to use in the 2023 election campaign, how many of them will you allocate for materials in accessible format to make the electoral process accessible, and so on. Unfortunately, only two parties answered us. Compared to 2019, we had only one response then,” he said, adding that the web pages of electoral competitors are not accessible to the visually impaired and the blind. “This makes us believe that the political parties do not attach great importance to this area, they do not understand the issue in depth, and this raises quite a few questions for us. Taking into account the fact that we have 168,000 people with disabilities, which represents 6.5% of Moldova’s population, we should somehow change the optics a little, because the way it is now, it’s no good”, said Victor Koroli.

The debate was the sixth installment of a series dedicated to the November local elections, run by IPN with the support of the Soros Moldova Foundation.