June 9, 2025 • 12 mins
Kelly Schulz, Founder and Director of Knowable Me and Peter Greco discuss the results of a recent survey concerning people with disabilities access to information about the election. Privacy, staff training and the voting process itself are areas of concern.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:05):
We always enjoy catching up with Kelly Schultz. Doesn't matter
what we talk about, it's always interesting and always relevant.
A few weeks ago, we caught up with Kelly regarding
information about the election and how people voted. I think
the results are in in more ways than one. Kelly,
great to have you back on and welcome.
S2 (00:20):
Thank you Peter. It's always fun. Love a good chat.
S1 (00:23):
Yeah. Well tell us for those who might have missed that,
you were looking to find out what people's, uh, kind
of impressions and experience was with voting, uh, this time around.
S2 (00:32):
Yeah, it was voting accessibility specifically. So, you know, our
research is generally focused on people with disabilities, and it
was just about accessibility. You know, we've got this compulsory
voting thing in Australia which a lot of people frown upon. But,
you know, compulsory voting came out of the fact that
we should all have the opportunity to vote. So it's
almost inherently an accessibility thing. But how accessible is voting?
S1 (00:55):
And you've kind of done some digging around or some
asking of people to find out what their experience was.
S2 (01:00):
We did, and that was it was actually before the election.
So we were to find out before the election how
people felt about accessibility in some way. We could do
a follow up to find out how how it actually went.
Some people had pre polled by the time we did
our survey, but lots of people hadn't yet voted. So yeah,
it was it was a it was an interesting mix.
S1 (01:20):
Now what did you ask and what did you find out?
S2 (01:23):
Well, it was absolutely about voting and the process itself
and information nothing to do with their political persuasion or
they were going to vote for. We talked about a
few different things. We talked about overall accessibility and voting choices.
So how people choose to vote. We talked about information
accessibility and the fact that the Electoral Commission obviously does
(01:45):
have some accessible voting options in terms of the information
that you can get about the election. We also asked
people about electronic voting because obviously not something we have
here in Australia, but we're keen to understand whether people
thought that was a good idea. And we also asked
about sort of popular opinion, public opinion and privacy in voting.
(02:05):
So privacy is a big one for people, particularly where
they need assistance.
S1 (02:09):
What did you find out? What was kind of can
you kind of glean something from it all? I guess
different people, different experiences, of course.
S2 (02:16):
Well, I think the headline for me is that 43%
of people have considered not voting because of accessibility.
S1 (02:25):
Wow. That is a headline.
S2 (02:27):
Think about that. That's the the the disability population we're
talking about, you know, what is it 20% of the
population these days. So 43% of those people have considered
not voting because of accessibility barriers to to vote, and 18%
of them have actually said they have skipped voting, be
it federal or state voting in some way because of
(02:47):
the barriers to to actually get to vote.
S1 (02:50):
You can't compare that with the general population.
S2 (02:52):
Can you know, we don't have a general population view
of that. We're only talking about the the population we have,
which is people with disabilities.
S1 (03:00):
And you have to think that was overrepresented in terms
of those numbers, you'd think that in the general population.
Less well, of course, less people would have the accessibility
issue or excuse anyway.
S2 (03:10):
Exactly. So. But if you do take so if we
look at the percentage of the the overall population being 20%
and with disability 43% of those, so we're talking, you know,
like 8 to 10% of the overall population is what
we're talking about potentially.
S1 (03:27):
Yeah. Which is very, very high. What about in terms
of getting access to information? I've got to admit I
was okay as far as my, uh, information coming to
me went and quite in a timely way. But I
don't think that was the the overall experience.
S2 (03:43):
So we did a couple of extra tests on getting
access to information. Generally, only less than 30% of the
people we surveyed knew that there was accessible information available,
and it may not have applied to them. So not
all disabilities obviously have an information accessibility element to them.
(04:05):
But in terms of we did a couple of tests,
we did four different tests of requesting accessible information from
the Electoral Commission following their process. Three out of four
of those were successful and people did receive the information
prior to the election. So that's a good thing. But
the experience of actually getting it wasn't necessarily that great
(04:27):
because of really just training. So to ramp up an election.
The commission's got to find people. Basically, they've got to
find people and train them who are available now to
sit and answer phone calls. But what we would say
is they probably needs to be a little bit more
emphasis on people calling for support to understand what the
(04:48):
accessible information options are.
S1 (04:49):
It's a little bit like suburb lottery, isn't it? Or
a situation where, depending on who you get when you
ring as to what information you get, that's right.
S2 (04:58):
And if someone has heard of it before or done
it before, or had someone else call with that particular question.
But overall, I think information accessibility is an interesting one.
One of the the sort of insights and suggestions out
of this we have is to make the accessible information
hub more obvious and easier to navigate, because there are
(05:19):
there were people who fed back that there is easy
read versions of the information, but it's not easy read
to get there. So it's great that you've got an
easy read version, but how do I get there to
get the easy read version?
S1 (05:34):
It also found in terms of finding out the candidates,
once you got there, it was okay. But again, getting
to that particular point on the website and I must
admit I actually asked, have my candidate sent to me
in Braille, which they did do, and in time, so
well done on that. But I tried before to check
out the website and get the information. As I said,
once I finally got there it was okay, but it
(05:55):
wasn't that easy to get there. Which, you know, uh,
I was gonna got a list of person summaries, maybe
not as obsessive about something like this, but hey, I'll
blow this. I'm going to just give it away.
S2 (06:06):
And.
S1 (06:06):
You just. I'll give it. I'll get. Yeah, I'll get
someone else to help me somewhere down the track.
S2 (06:10):
Yeah. So, I mean, your experience validates exactly what we heard,
which is, it's great that you've got accessible things, but
make them easier, more, more easy to access in the
first place.
S1 (06:19):
Anything else from the survey that sort of stands out?
S2 (06:22):
Well, I think, um, particularly for the blind, low vision community,
if we talk about them specifically. Overall, we ask people
to rate the accessibility of their voting experience, previous voting experiences.
And it was a 1 to 5 question and we
came out at three, which is pretty understandable overall. But
people with blindness and low vision came out at two, right?
(06:44):
So the blind low vision community actually feel that election
and voting is less accessible than the rest of the
disability community, which I thought was an interesting insight. And
then when we talk about electronic voting, the low vision
community have, uh, far more trust in electronic voting than
(07:06):
everyone else as well. So a.
S1 (07:07):
Fascinating.
S2 (07:08):
71% of our low vision and blind users said that
they would trust, um, electronic voting, and only 7% said
they would distrust it. So everyone else is a bit
in the middle. But are the averages overall the the
average trust was only at 20% of people would trust
electronic voting. So the blind low vision community are much more.
(07:30):
I don't know whether they're more tech savvy or more
trusting of those sorts of systems, or whether electronic voting
would feel like a much more accessible, independent way to vote.
Because if you're using telephone voting, the feedback we got
there was still that. But I still have to tell
it to a person so it doesn't feel private and
it doesn't feel independent. So I wonder, I'm not sure.
(07:51):
I wonder whether there's something about electronic voting that the
blind and low vision community would embrace, compared to lots
of other people.
S1 (07:58):
I think that's it. I mean, as you were going
through that, that would be my sort of instinct to say, well,
this was good. And I've often said, don't let the
good get in the way of the perfect. I mean,
this telephone voting isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than
what other options might be. But I think the electronic
way to kind of feel like you've done it all
on your own and hit the button send and that's
(08:18):
it would feel a bit more like, well, I've done
it all myself, rather than, uh, yes, it's been good
to speak to someone who's taken my vote, but not
quite as secretively as might have otherwise been the case.
S2 (08:28):
Yeah, and I think privacy is a big thing for
people when it comes to voting. We heard from a
few different people who said, you know, they don't feel
like even when they're crammed in in a polling place
that they that it's private, but particularly if they have
to have someone help them. So even if it's a
trusted person, you're still having a conversation or, uh, you know,
(08:51):
one of the, one of the people we spoke to
needs to sit down to vote. Did you know that
there's actually nowhere to sit down to vote. If you
bring your own chair and you're in a wheelchair, you're fine.
You've got a lower.
S1 (09:02):
Yeah.
S2 (09:03):
Great point. But there's actually they just don't generally have chairs. Yeah.
So if you need to, if you have that sort
of fatigue or a disability where you can walk in there,
but you need to sit down regularly, there's nowhere for
you to vote so people can end up in all
sorts of different places because they need to sit down,
which ends up them not having a private voting experience.
S1 (09:22):
By voting by phone. But I went with someone just
because they had to vote or they had to vote.
They chose the vote on the day at a booth,
and we probably stood around for 25 to 35 minutes beforehand.
And you're quite right when you get into the booth,
I mean, it's pretty flimsy in terms of, uh, you know, the,
the cardboard, the partitions that you got up around you.
I mean, okay, you know, no one's going to tell
(09:44):
you people have to be peeking in to see exactly
what's going on. But, you know, people could feel a bit,
shall we say, vulnerable or or feel like it's not
as secure as you might otherwise be the case.
S2 (09:55):
And quite vulnerable and sensory overload as well. They're not
exactly quiet places either.
S1 (09:59):
Oh no. No. And actually we chatted beforehand and you said, oh,
when you go along, uh, ask about how to vote cards.
Would you believe where we went was so quiet? There
were no how to vote? Hand her out.
S2 (10:10):
Oh, no. You missed opportunity.
S1 (10:12):
Missed opportunity?
S2 (10:13):
Yeah, that would have been great. And I think the
other thing, the other thing that I will add is
staff training becomes one of the other elements that is
always comes up in almost everything we do is that
people people and training and almost from both sides. So
it was really interesting to hear from from people who
felt dismissed by polling staff previously, one who the person
(10:38):
at the registration desk turned to their mother and said,
are they pretending to be an adult because of short stature?
You are just atrocious versus someone else who is deaf
and he just wanted to vote. And they ended up
going through this whole rigmarole process of, uh, do you
(10:59):
want us to get an interpreter on a video link?
Can you lip read? What do you want to do?
Sort of overdoing it when really you just needed to
give his name and get his ballot papers. They ended
up explaining to him how the voting process works. And
he said to me, I've been voting for 20 years.
I know how to do it. I just wanted my
ballot papers.
S1 (11:17):
Yeah. Amazing. Kelly, what happens with your information now? What
do you do with it?
S2 (11:21):
Well, I need to put a bit of effort into
writing it out in a coherent way, and then it'll
be up on our website for all to see and
all to take advantage of.
S1 (11:30):
All right. Well, maybe let you, uh, or let us
know when that happens, and we can let people know. Kelly,
great to catch up. Now, if people want to find
out more about what you're doing, uh, how can we, uh,
get in touch with you? What's your website?
S2 (11:41):
Website is knowable. Me so k n o w a
b l e dot. If you want to sign up,
that's forward slash. Sign up. Uh, come and join us
and provide your feedback.
S1 (11:52):
Kelly Schulz there from knowable me.
We always enjoy catching up with Kelly Schultz. Doesn't matter
what we talk about, it's always interesting and always relevant.
A few weeks ago, we caught up with Kelly regarding
information about the election and how people voted. I think
the results are in in more ways than one. Kelly,
great to have you back on and welcome.
S2 (00:20):
Thank you Peter. It's always fun. Love a good chat.
S1 (00:23):
Yeah. Well tell us for those who might have missed that,
you were looking to find out what people's, uh, kind
of impressions and experience was with voting, uh, this time around.
S2 (00:32):
Yeah, it was voting accessibility specifically. So, you know, our
research is generally focused on people with disabilities, and it
was just about accessibility. You know, we've got this compulsory
voting thing in Australia which a lot of people frown upon. But,
you know, compulsory voting came out of the fact that
we should all have the opportunity to vote. So it's
almost inherently an accessibility thing. But how accessible is voting?
S1 (00:55):
And you've kind of done some digging around or some
asking of people to find out what their experience was.
S2 (01:00):
We did, and that was it was actually before the election.
So we were to find out before the election how
people felt about accessibility in some way. We could do
a follow up to find out how how it actually went.
Some people had pre polled by the time we did
our survey, but lots of people hadn't yet voted. So yeah,
it was it was a it was an interesting mix.
S1 (01:20):
Now what did you ask and what did you find out?
S2 (01:23):
Well, it was absolutely about voting and the process itself
and information nothing to do with their political persuasion or
they were going to vote for. We talked about a
few different things. We talked about overall accessibility and voting choices.
So how people choose to vote. We talked about information
accessibility and the fact that the Electoral Commission obviously does
(01:45):
have some accessible voting options in terms of the information
that you can get about the election. We also asked
people about electronic voting because obviously not something we have
here in Australia, but we're keen to understand whether people
thought that was a good idea. And we also asked
about sort of popular opinion, public opinion and privacy in voting.
(02:05):
So privacy is a big one for people, particularly where
they need assistance.
S1 (02:09):
What did you find out? What was kind of can
you kind of glean something from it all? I guess
different people, different experiences, of course.
S2 (02:16):
Well, I think the headline for me is that 43%
of people have considered not voting because of accessibility.
S1 (02:25):
Wow. That is a headline.
S2 (02:27):
Think about that. That's the the the disability population we're
talking about, you know, what is it 20% of the
population these days. So 43% of those people have considered
not voting because of accessibility barriers to to vote, and 18%
of them have actually said they have skipped voting, be
it federal or state voting in some way because of
(02:47):
the barriers to to actually get to vote.
S1 (02:50):
You can't compare that with the general population.
S2 (02:52):
Can you know, we don't have a general population view
of that. We're only talking about the the population we have,
which is people with disabilities.
S1 (03:00):
And you have to think that was overrepresented in terms
of those numbers, you'd think that in the general population.
Less well, of course, less people would have the accessibility
issue or excuse anyway.
S2 (03:10):
Exactly. So. But if you do take so if we
look at the percentage of the the overall population being 20%
and with disability 43% of those, so we're talking, you know,
like 8 to 10% of the overall population is what
we're talking about potentially.
S1 (03:27):
Yeah. Which is very, very high. What about in terms
of getting access to information? I've got to admit I
was okay as far as my, uh, information coming to
me went and quite in a timely way. But I
don't think that was the the overall experience.
S2 (03:43):
So we did a couple of extra tests on getting
access to information. Generally, only less than 30% of the
people we surveyed knew that there was accessible information available,
and it may not have applied to them. So not
all disabilities obviously have an information accessibility element to them.
(04:05):
But in terms of we did a couple of tests,
we did four different tests of requesting accessible information from
the Electoral Commission following their process. Three out of four
of those were successful and people did receive the information
prior to the election. So that's a good thing. But
the experience of actually getting it wasn't necessarily that great
(04:27):
because of really just training. So to ramp up an election.
The commission's got to find people. Basically, they've got to
find people and train them who are available now to
sit and answer phone calls. But what we would say
is they probably needs to be a little bit more
emphasis on people calling for support to understand what the
(04:48):
accessible information options are.
S1 (04:49):
It's a little bit like suburb lottery, isn't it? Or
a situation where, depending on who you get when you
ring as to what information you get, that's right.
S2 (04:58):
And if someone has heard of it before or done
it before, or had someone else call with that particular question.
But overall, I think information accessibility is an interesting one.
One of the the sort of insights and suggestions out
of this we have is to make the accessible information
hub more obvious and easier to navigate, because there are
(05:19):
there were people who fed back that there is easy
read versions of the information, but it's not easy read
to get there. So it's great that you've got an
easy read version, but how do I get there to
get the easy read version?
S1 (05:34):
It also found in terms of finding out the candidates,
once you got there, it was okay. But again, getting
to that particular point on the website and I must
admit I actually asked, have my candidate sent to me
in Braille, which they did do, and in time, so
well done on that. But I tried before to check
out the website and get the information. As I said,
once I finally got there it was okay, but it
(05:55):
wasn't that easy to get there. Which, you know, uh,
I was gonna got a list of person summaries, maybe
not as obsessive about something like this, but hey, I'll
blow this. I'm going to just give it away.
S2 (06:06):
And.
S1 (06:06):
You just. I'll give it. I'll get. Yeah, I'll get
someone else to help me somewhere down the track.
S2 (06:10):
Yeah. So, I mean, your experience validates exactly what we heard,
which is, it's great that you've got accessible things, but
make them easier, more, more easy to access in the
first place.
S1 (06:19):
Anything else from the survey that sort of stands out?
S2 (06:22):
Well, I think, um, particularly for the blind, low vision community,
if we talk about them specifically. Overall, we ask people
to rate the accessibility of their voting experience, previous voting experiences.
And it was a 1 to 5 question and we
came out at three, which is pretty understandable overall. But
people with blindness and low vision came out at two, right?
(06:44):
So the blind low vision community actually feel that election
and voting is less accessible than the rest of the
disability community, which I thought was an interesting insight. And
then when we talk about electronic voting, the low vision
community have, uh, far more trust in electronic voting than
(07:06):
everyone else as well. So a.
S1 (07:07):
Fascinating.
S2 (07:08):
71% of our low vision and blind users said that
they would trust, um, electronic voting, and only 7% said
they would distrust it. So everyone else is a bit
in the middle. But are the averages overall the the
average trust was only at 20% of people would trust
electronic voting. So the blind low vision community are much more.
(07:30):
I don't know whether they're more tech savvy or more
trusting of those sorts of systems, or whether electronic voting
would feel like a much more accessible, independent way to vote.
Because if you're using telephone voting, the feedback we got
there was still that. But I still have to tell
it to a person so it doesn't feel private and
it doesn't feel independent. So I wonder, I'm not sure.
(07:51):
I wonder whether there's something about electronic voting that the
blind and low vision community would embrace, compared to lots
of other people.
S1 (07:58):
I think that's it. I mean, as you were going
through that, that would be my sort of instinct to say, well,
this was good. And I've often said, don't let the
good get in the way of the perfect. I mean,
this telephone voting isn't perfect, but it's certainly better than
what other options might be. But I think the electronic
way to kind of feel like you've done it all
on your own and hit the button send and that's
(08:18):
it would feel a bit more like, well, I've done
it all myself, rather than, uh, yes, it's been good
to speak to someone who's taken my vote, but not
quite as secretively as might have otherwise been the case.
S2 (08:28):
Yeah, and I think privacy is a big thing for
people when it comes to voting. We heard from a
few different people who said, you know, they don't feel
like even when they're crammed in in a polling place
that they that it's private, but particularly if they have
to have someone help them. So even if it's a
trusted person, you're still having a conversation or, uh, you know,
(08:51):
one of the, one of the people we spoke to
needs to sit down to vote. Did you know that
there's actually nowhere to sit down to vote. If you
bring your own chair and you're in a wheelchair, you're fine.
You've got a lower.
S1 (09:02):
Yeah.
S2 (09:03):
Great point. But there's actually they just don't generally have chairs. Yeah.
So if you need to, if you have that sort
of fatigue or a disability where you can walk in there,
but you need to sit down regularly, there's nowhere for
you to vote so people can end up in all
sorts of different places because they need to sit down,
which ends up them not having a private voting experience.
S1 (09:22):
By voting by phone. But I went with someone just
because they had to vote or they had to vote.
They chose the vote on the day at a booth,
and we probably stood around for 25 to 35 minutes beforehand.
And you're quite right when you get into the booth,
I mean, it's pretty flimsy in terms of, uh, you know, the,
the cardboard, the partitions that you got up around you.
I mean, okay, you know, no one's going to tell
(09:44):
you people have to be peeking in to see exactly
what's going on. But, you know, people could feel a bit,
shall we say, vulnerable or or feel like it's not
as secure as you might otherwise be the case.
S2 (09:55):
And quite vulnerable and sensory overload as well. They're not
exactly quiet places either.
S1 (09:59):
Oh no. No. And actually we chatted beforehand and you said, oh,
when you go along, uh, ask about how to vote cards.
Would you believe where we went was so quiet? There
were no how to vote? Hand her out.
S2 (10:10):
Oh, no. You missed opportunity.
S1 (10:12):
Missed opportunity?
S2 (10:13):
Yeah, that would have been great. And I think the
other thing, the other thing that I will add is
staff training becomes one of the other elements that is
always comes up in almost everything we do is that
people people and training and almost from both sides. So
it was really interesting to hear from from people who
felt dismissed by polling staff previously, one who the person
(10:38):
at the registration desk turned to their mother and said,
are they pretending to be an adult because of short stature?
You are just atrocious versus someone else who is deaf
and he just wanted to vote. And they ended up
going through this whole rigmarole process of, uh, do you
(10:59):
want us to get an interpreter on a video link?
Can you lip read? What do you want to do?
Sort of overdoing it when really you just needed to
give his name and get his ballot papers. They ended
up explaining to him how the voting process works. And
he said to me, I've been voting for 20 years.
I know how to do it. I just wanted my
ballot papers.
S1 (11:17):
Yeah. Amazing. Kelly, what happens with your information now? What
do you do with it?
S2 (11:21):
Well, I need to put a bit of effort into
writing it out in a coherent way, and then it'll
be up on our website for all to see and
all to take advantage of.
S1 (11:30):
All right. Well, maybe let you, uh, or let us
know when that happens, and we can let people know. Kelly,
great to catch up. Now, if people want to find
out more about what you're doing, uh, how can we, uh,
get in touch with you? What's your website?
S2 (11:41):
Website is knowable. Me so k n o w a
b l e dot. If you want to sign up,
that's forward slash. Sign up. Uh, come and join us
and provide your feedback.
S1 (11:52):
Kelly Schulz there from knowable me.
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