Self-Advocacy Activities and Voting Participation in Matched Samples of Americans with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Americans with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) vote at rates below those of the total U.S. population. Self-advocacy may hold a key toward increasing voting opportunity. We used data from two sources, merged at the individual level and aggregated over five years to construct statistically equivalent groups of adults with IDD who had and had not participated in self-advocacy activities to see how their voting opportunity differed. People with IDD who participated in self-advocacy activities were 12.7% more likely to have had the opportunity to vote than similar people who had not engaged in self-advocacy activities. This suggests that systemic investments to enhance self-advocacy may assist people with IDD to become a more visible and powerful voting block.