4. #CripTheVote

“The Revolution Is Here”

In the first episode of her Disability Visibility podcast in 2017, recorded in July, “days after the GOP health care bill died in the Senate,” Wong interviewed Beratan and Pulrang on “Activism and Disability Community,” and they reflected on the #SummerOfADAPT protests as well as on their ongoing work as the founders and coorganizers of the #CripTheVote campaign. Wong introduced the conversation by providing a somewhat unconventional image of revolutionary activism as happening online: “The revolution is here,” Wong quipped. “One podcast, one transcript, one tweet at a time.”3 The three begin the conversation by discussing the activism that had taken place over the past year to prevent the Republican plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, activism that culminated in the #SummerOfADAPT. Wong describes the “great awakening” that took place through these protests, as nondisabled people gained a “little sense of what Medicaid is, what it does, and just how many people it touches.”4 Beratan adds, “I think one of the heartening things has been seeing people realize what value Medicaid adds to our society, that people are able to work and live and raise their families, go to school, give birth to healthy kids, because of what Medicaid provides.”5 The three then discuss the need for a variety of political tactics, including direct action as a “kind of secret weapon,” as Wong puts it.6 Pulrang expresses appreciation that disability activism has been “really focused and disciplined on issues and their actual effects rather than . . . going along with the obsession with Trump . . . Trump the man, Trump the weirdo.”7 It is this comment from Pulrang about Trump that then shifts the discussion from #SummerOfADAPT to #CripTheVote.

The three acknowledge that this focus on broader issues and not a “cult of personality” surrounding any one politician, or as devolving into “partisan crap,” explains the group’s effectiveness in bringing disability into political conversations in the United States and beyond. Pulrang explains that the purpose of #CripTheVote was not to approach “disability as a fairly simple and narrow range of issues” but as “something that relates to a huge tent of issues.”8 And Wong points out that, although the group was initially planning to disband after the 2016 presidential election, they decided to keep going as a way to continue building the community that had emerged and grown out of the hashtag and Twitter chats.

By creating virtual spaces in which disabled people and their allies can engage with issues and build community, #CripTheVote’s tactics are different from ADAPT’s, but no less important as a modality for and means of access to political participation for disabled people. The group has explicitly challenged the ableism of the frequently voiced critique that dismisses “hashtag activism” as not real activism, articulating instead for the importance of diverse forms of engagement and participation. While marching in the streets, occupying public spaces, and getting arrested are often effective activist practices, as shown in the last chapter, the more accretive practices of community building and creating networks of support and mutual aid are equally important, if often less immediately visible and operating in a different, more indirect, temporality to direct-action politics.

Importantly, #CripTheVote has also been concerned with emphasizing the intersectionality of disability experience, both in terms of the many kinds of impairment under the disability umbrella, as well as the many ways race, gender, class, and sexuality inflect and intersect with the multiplicity of disability experiences and vice versa. They have made a space for a wide variety of people to share their disability experiences, as well as for discussion of how white supremacist and cisheteropatriarchal systems function through ableist attitudes and disabling structures. Thus, their work joins recent work in disability studies seeking to, as Jasbir Puar puts it in The Right to Maim, “disrupt the normative (white, male, middle-class, physically impaired) subjects that have historically dominated the field.”9 As Puar asserts, “The epistemic whiteness of the field is no dirty secret,”10 a problem sometimes also reflected in activist work that seeks to distinguish deserving from undeserving recipients of social and political support, as we saw in relation to Bruce Darling’s disturbing comments about immigrants in the last chapter.

The Emergence of #CripTheVote

#CripTheVote held its first Twitter chat before a Democratic Party candidate debate on February 11, 2016, and their second before a Republican Party candidate debate two days later. The group then conducted a survey to find out what disabled people thought were the top policy issues that they wanted candidates for president and other elected offices to address.11 In March 2016, the group held two more chats on disability and health policy, which incorporated the survey results by organizing the discussions to address the top five areas of concern: healthcare, civil rights and discrimination, employment, accessibility, and housing. After these chats, the three founders began to invite guest hosts as another means to expand the already-burgeoning online community that the hashtag and conversations were fostering. In April 2016, for example, a chat on voter accessibility for and suppression and disenfranchisement of people with disabilities included as one of the guest hosts Carrie Ann Lucas, the activist discussed in the last chapter who was arrested in 2017 with other ADAPTers at Senator Gardner’s office in Colorado and who at the time was also executive director of Disabled Parents Rights. This chat asked questions about voter registration, experiences of disabled people at polling places with staff and voting technologies, and about voting rights for institutionalized and intellectually disabled people. Before her untimely death, Lucas was a frequent participant in #CripTheVote chats and had run, unsuccessfully, for Town Board in her hometown of Windsor, Colorado.

In another later chat featuring disabled candidates for office, Lucas answered a question I posed about the difference between activism, specifically direct-action protests, and serving in office. Lucas’s thoughtful response referred to the multiple temporalities and spaces of politics: “Direct action is about change,” she tweeted. “Governing is often about compromise. One must be an ethical leader when pushed to compromise.”12 This response captures the multilayered approach to disability in action that #CripTheVote makes space and time for. Here we have a statement made by a disabled woman candidate for local office in the United States describing the distinction between direct-action politics and the politics of compromise. This statement is made as part of a chat on Twitter whose purpose is to increase the participation of disabled people in politics, by utilizing other modalities beyond direct action and serving in office to involve people in public life. Without being overly sanguine about social media’s transformative potential, what the organizers of #CripTheVote grasped and put into action is the possibility that virtual spaces might increase access to public space and allow for greater participation among people who, for a variety of reasons, find it difficult to negotiate certain spaces at certain times and at certain speeds. This emphasis on creating and sustaining access and connection is a key aspect of disability justice work as a kind of homemaking. In her book about the disability justice performance work of Sins Invalid, Shayda Kafai notes, “we all deserve connection and access to crip-centric liberated zone,”13 and online activities and programming allows for people to connect with others from home. In this way, Kafai explains, “home becomes an expansive place, hundreds of thousands of miles wide.”14

In a qualitative content analysis of the #CripTheVote campaign in 2016, social scientist Heather Walker analyzed more than 11,000 tweets with the hashtag to provide a “concentrated look into how disabled people used Twitter as a tool of political engagement in the 2016 United States Presidential election.”15 In examining data from #CripTheVote Twitter chats, Walker did not find that the chats were particularly successful in achieving one of the top stated goals of the #CripTheVote campaign in 2016: “To get disability issues mentioned during the presidential debate cycle.”16 Yet, as Walker notes, while this may be true at face value, she also wanted to think more expansively about what #CripTheVote achieved beyond this very time-specific and limited goal of getting a question about disability into a presidential debate in an election year. Walker argues that what #CripTheVote accomplished instead was to “counter ableist ideologies” and to amplify the lived experiences and personal stories of disabled people. She discusses four counternarratives that emerged through the campaign and hashtag that points to the agency of disabled people despite ableist attitudes and structural violence that constrains agency: “(1) disabled people are politically aware; (2) disabled people have voice; (3) the opinions of disabled people matter; and (4) disabled people will fight for their rights.”17 Walker calls #CripTheVote a “‘watershed moment’ for contemporary disability studies,” an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with. If we extend the analysis of #CripTheVote’s influence to the 2020 election and into the present moment, the extent of the influence, not just on disability studies but on politics in general, becomes even clearer.

From Campaign to Movement

Although published in 2020, Walker’s analysis focused on the chats #CripTheVote organized prior to the 2016 election, not on how the campaign carried on and adapted after the 2016 election. In the wake of Trump’s election, and the resulting policy decisions that had a directly negative impact on disabled people, the co-partners of #CripTheVote announced an “expanded vision thanks to the participation of the disability community.”18 Charting the future of #CripTheVote, the co-partners came up with a list of specific things #CripTheVote would do going forward, which included: “Remain online, community-based, and as decentralized as possible”; “Expand our focus beyond voting to other forms of political participation”; “Provide a space for conversation as a stimulus to collective action”; and “Partner with disabled people and organizations in broadening our movement’s perspectives and expertise.”19 This expanded vision revealed what I see as a strength of the group: its ability to reflect on and adapt its approach based on input from and in collaboration with the many participants in its conversations. Or, put another way, #CripTheVote demonstrates democracy in action as a kind of online disabled chorus, to adapt an image of the chorus as multitude from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, in which she documents the “experiments with freedom” of young Black women in cities in the twentieth century.20 Hartman explores different spaces in the city—“the hallway, bedroom, stoop, rooftop, airshaft, and kitchenette [that] provided the space of experiment.”21 The online spaces created by hashtags that I am describing here are a different kind of—virtual—space for experimentation than what Hartman captures in her historical account of young Black women’s practices of freedom in U.S. cities in the afterlife of slavery, but I want to draw a connection through the evocative image of the chorus, or what Hartman calls “the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure.”22 For disabled people, hashtags like #CripTheVote are portals to disability community and allow for collaboration and improvisation to unfold within the spaces of enclosure of stigma and ableism that prevent access to public spaces and reduce opportunities for participation in civic life.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Trump’s election in 2016, #CripTheVote’s online presence grew and its influence in building a cross-disability and intersectional crip community is hard to overstate. In 2017 alone, #CripTheVote hosted eleven chats, as well as three spotlight chats with disabled candidates in October 2017, including the one mentioned above with Carrie Ann Lucas. In a Year in Review blogpost, the three co-partners called 2017 an “interesting and tumultuous year” in which “we have seen the disability community under attack, defending against various legislation, policies, and actions by the current administration.”23 The Twitter chats covered a range of topics, including “Protecting the ADA and Disability Rights” in March, Trump’s “First 100 Days” in April, “Media Coverage of Disabled People in the Age of Trump” in June, “Healthcare Activism and Next Steps” in October, and “Mental Health, Ableism and Elected Officials” in December, to name the focus of just some of the chats held during the busy year. Rather than folding up shop after the 2016 election, #CripTheVote intensified and expanded its campaign. Increasing the political participation of disabled people was still the campaign’s primary objective, but what participation is, conceptually and in action, became a more prominent part of the conversation. Just as disability is a multiplicity, how one does disability and illness politics is also a multiplicity, and this is clear from the way #CripTheVote’s online tactics and strategies complemented ADAPT’s direct-action politics in 2017.

#CripTheVote in 2020

#CripTheVote’s influential Twitter chats continued throughout Trump’s presidency. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, #CripTheVote brought disability and illness politics to the general public’s attention through high-profile Twitter chats with presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. And as the United States and other nations went into lockdown because of the Covid-19 global pandemic, #CripTheVote also highlighted the problem of racial health disparities and the experiences of high-risk and immunocompromised people in the pandemic.

On January 7, 2020, #CripTheVote held a Twitter Town Hall Presidential Candidate Chat with Senator Elizabeth Warren.24 In introducing the candidate chat, Wong, using the @DisVisibility Twitter account, welcomed everyone, and linked to Senator Warren’s plan for “Protecting the Rights and Equality of People with Disabilities.”25 Senator Warren’s plan begins with a brief history of disability activism and several images of disabled activists:

From bus blockades in Denver, Section 504 sit-ins in San Francisco, and the Deaf President Now student movement in D.C. to protests outside of Mitch McConnell’s office and virtual marches, disability activists across the country have organized over decades to bring the nation’s attention to the injustices they face. Fighting a world that has excluded, exploited, and institutionalized them, they have put their lives on the line for a more just future and changed this country for the better for everyone.26

In the second paragraph, Warren’s plan mentions by name several disabled activists—Judith Heumann, Joyce Ardell Jackson, Justin Dart, Ed Roberts, Lois Curtis, and Anita Cameron are all named—but also emphasizes the “thousands of others” who have “won hard-fought civil rights victories that reshaped the way our country treats individuals with disabilities.”27 The plan then notes that 2020 is the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the one-hundredth anniversary of the Vocational Rehabilitation Program and argues that much progress has been made but that “we still have a lot of ground left to cover.”28 Warren asserts that, “As President, I will work in partnership with the disability community to combat ableism,” before listing the plan’s four main goals: “equal opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self sufficiency.”29 This is just the preamble for what is an incredibly detailed and comprehensive plan that recognizes both the problem of systemic ableism and the potential for and importance of the participation of disabled people in public life and civil society.

In a tweet just before the #CripTheVote chat, Warren posted a short video where she said she was looking forward to “our first ever Twitter Town Hall.”30 As I noted in a quote retweet in response, it seemed appropriate (and momentous!) that Warren’s first ever Twitter town hall was on “the topic of disability rights and justice because disabled activists have used social media very effectively to organize.” And, I also argued, “#CripTheVote is one of the best examples of this activism in action.”31 The chat generated an enthusiastic response from disabled people on Twitter, as well as some coverage in the mainstream press. For example, Zack Budryk covered the chat for The Hill, noting that Warren confirmed in the chat that her campaign included disabled staffers, tweeting, “We have staff with disabilities across the campaign. Their lived experiences and talents help foster an inclusive and accessible campaign.”32 Budryk interviewed Gregg Beratan after the event, who said, “We are thrilled with how it went.” He added that the organizers got what they had hoped for: “genuine engagement from the candidate.” He also emphasized that the chat was a success not simply because Warren and her team took the time to answer #CripTheVote’s questions that they supplied to her in advance, but that she “got to see so many of the questions from the community even if she couldn’t answer them all. Over the five years that we have been doing this, the people participating have consistently pointed out that all policy issues are disability policy issues. [. . .] To hear that come back to us from a major candidate was fantastic.”33 The chat trended on Twitter, signaling to other political candidates and the public that disability was a topic of considerable importance, but also that it acted as a lens through which to view and analyze other topics—health care, education, housing, labor, immigration, and so on. In this way, electoral politics was “cripped” through a Twitter chat using the hashtag #CripTheVote.34

#CripTheVote on Pandemic Precarities

The online community created by the #CripTheVote hashtag and Twitter chats became even more important with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns in spring 2020. On May 17, 2020, #CripTheVote held a Twitter chat on the coronavirus and health disparities with guest hosts Anita Cameron (@ADAPTanita) and Dustin Gibson (@notthreefifths), which would be the first of three chats, thus far, dealing with the impact of Covid-19 on disabled and immunocompromised people.35 Wong, tweeting from her @DisVisibility account, promoted the chat and, along with the #CripTheVote hashtag, added several other hashtags for the topic, including: #HighRiskCovid19, #NoBodyIsDisposable, and #WeAreEssential.36 As is always the case with #CripTheVote Twitter chats, this chat was incredibly well-organized with a list of eight questions prepared and distributed in advance that covered both general, overarching topics (e.g., “Q3 How does systemic racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression result in health disparities and disproportionate impact on Black, brown, and indigenous communities?”) and more specific situations, for example for institutionalized persons (e.g. “Q6: Sites of confinement, like nursing facilities, prisons/jails, ‘detention’ centers, institutions, group ‘homes’ and other congregate settings are experiencing rapid #COVID19 outbreaks and deaths. What kind of actions are needed to save lives?)”37 It is also important to note that the chat not only took up topics related to the experiences of disabled and high-risk people during the pandemic but also that the chat itself became a site for the practice of care and the enactment of survivance. The first question makes this disability-justice care work clear, asking, “How are YOU doing so far? How are you dealing with the challenges of staying at home or going out, getting your needs met, and keeping safe especially if you are high risk and/or immunocompromised?”38

Thus, the chat opens with a check-in and gives everyone tuning in for the chat (not just the organizers and the guest hosts) an opportunity to connect with others and express their fears, frustrations, and hopes. I have tuned in for many #CripTheVote chats and one of the most notable aspects of the conversations, in general, is how welcoming and encouraging the coorganizers are to everyone who joins. Especially in the pandemic, this care work is key to providing community and crip solidarity for high-risk and immunocompromised people who have been increasingly isolated by the threat of the coronavirus and have, understandably, felt “demoralized” by repeated policy failures, as Andrew Pulrang put it in his tweet introducing himself in the coronavirus and health disparities chat.39 Other participants expressed exhaustion from the effort to keep safe, trauma from witnessing mass sickness and death, and despair at the shocking disregard for the lives of disabled people, people of color (who make up the majority of “essential” workers), and incarcerated and other institutionalized people. And, even at this relatively early stage of the pandemic, there was already a critique of what Dustin Gibson identified as “attempts to return back to ‘normalcy.’”40 While the chats are scheduled at a particular time and usually last an hour (or sometimes only a half an hour), the coorganizers always emphasize that the hashtag allows a person to check out, and even participate in, the chat later and at their own pace. The resources provided by the chat are there to be discovered later, but so too, potentially, is the online disability community that the hashtag enacts.41

The Future of Disability Twitter

I end this chapter with this important point about the multiple temporalities for enacting online disability community afforded by the #CripTheVote hashtag and chats because, as I write, the future of Twitter, recently purchased by Elon Musk, remains in the balance. As many have noted on and off Twitter since Musk’s acquisition, although far from perfect, Twitter has been a lifeline for many disabled people. One early sign of Musk’s, at best, lack of concern and, at worst, contempt for disabled Twitter users, is the firing of the entire Accessibility Experience Team, announced in a tweet by Gerard K. Cohen on November 4, 2022.42 Cohen’s tweet noted, “There aren’t many people that have had the opportunity to make such an important global platform like Twitter accessible, but we understood the mission.”43 In one accessibility feature created just before the firing of the Accessibility Experience Team, Twitter added an image description reminder as an opt-in feature for users. As Mia Sato noted in an article in The Verge about the new feature, “The introduction of alt text reminders is a long time coming—disability activists and allies have lobbied Twitter for more tools around alt text and have asked sighted users to be more consistent with adding alt text to images.”44

Rather than end with Musk’s ableism and the potential loss of Twitter as a space for creating the conditions of possibility for disabled participation in U.S. politics and culture, I end this chapter with an image and image description of #CripTheVote created by artist Micah Bazant and available on the #CripTheVote blog (Figure 4). On their website, Bazant describes themselves as a “visual artist and cultural strategist who works with social justice movements to reimagine the world. They create art inspired by struggles to end white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and transphobia.”45 One of Bazant’s best-known images is a gorgeous poster of trans activist Marsha P. Johnson with the phrase “No Pride for Some of Us Without Liberation for All of Us,” which was created for LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations in 2013 and has since circulated widely as an inspiration for trans and queer racial justice work. Bazant’s “Crip the Vote” image, produced in October 2020 in collaboration with Alice Wong and Disability Visibility to showcase the work of #CripTheVote, is a similarly joyful image of politics in action. On their Instagram page, Bazant frames the image in relation to voting rights for disabled people, adding a long caption about accessible and inaccessible voting that begins: “Access is love. We all have the right to voting access! If you need support you have the right to have a person of your choice help you register, research and cast your vote without pressure or unwanted influence.”46 Thus, the image of two disabled people of color leaning into each other makes visible how access is love. It also makes visible what #CripTheVote has made possible: disability community, solidarity, and love.