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HomeMy WebLinkAbout10-06-26 Correspondence - Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings - We Won in Court. Again.From:Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]We Won in Court. Again. Date:Tuesday, October 6, 2026 9:20:37 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Every paid subscription supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is nowhere near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! We Won in Court. Again. Two court victories in one week. Different cases. Same idea: rights haveto mean something in real life. READ IN APP Well, this has been quite a week. Last week, I told you about an important federal court ruling allowing disability discrimination claims against the City of Helena arising from the police shooting of Paul Rolfes to move forward. Today, I get to tell you something else. We won in court. Again. OCT 6 And this time, it’s a final ruling from a Montana district court striking down a state law that caused thousands of absentee ballots to be rejected. These are very different cases. But I’ve been thinking about what connects them. It comes down to something pretty simple: Rights have to mean something in real life. You may have seen the coverage in this morning’s papers: Independent Record Daily Montanan Montana Free Press During the 2025 legislative session, Montana enacted House Bill 719. Among other things, HB 719 required people voting absentee to put their birth year on the envelope when returning their ballot. We testified against the bill. We warned that it would create another barrier capable of preventing lawful votes from being counted without meaningfully making Montana’s elections more secure. The Legislature passed it anyway. Miss the requirement, enter the wrong year, transpose a number, or have information that didn’t match election records, and your ballot could go uncounted unless you successfully completed the cure process by the deadline. That sounds like a small administrative requirement. Its consequences weren’t small. In some Montana counties, rejection rates more than doubled. In Gallatin County, the rejection rate in the May 2026 all-mail election was nearly six times the November 2024 rate. 1,814 ballots went uncounted in one election solely because of a missing or incorrect birth year. Think about that. People went to vote like they always have. They got their ballots. They filled them out. They returned them. And 1,814 ballots went uncounted simply because of Winning is the headline. Here’s what Ithink matters more. a missing or incorrect birth year. And if you bristle at my suggestion that this requirement wasn’t accomplishing much, keep reading. We’re getting to the evidence. Disabled and older Montanans disproportionately rely on absentee voting. Disability Rights Montana and Big Sky 55+ challenged the law. The court ultimately recognized the disproportional use of absentee voting and that some disabled voters can encounter barriers figuring out what information is being requested or physically writing birth-date information on a ballot envelope. On October 2, the court granted our motion for summary judgment, declared HB 719 unconstitutional under the Montana Constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote, and blocked the State from enforcing it. The court concluded that the State failed to justify the burden the requirement placed on voting. We won. Press Release Court Order The government has a legitimate responsibility to protect our elections. All of us have an interest in elections we can trust. And secure elections and accessible elections are not competing values. We can have both. In fact, we should demand both. Governments should solve real problems, protect our freedoms, and design public The Right to Vote Shouldn’t Dependon One More Box on an Envelope systems that actually work for the people who use them. The evidence in this case showed a remarkable mismatch. The birth-year requirement caused thousands of ballots to be rejected across the recent elections considered by the court. At the same time, our expert identified only one case of fraudulent absentee-ballot impersonation in Montana over roughly 40 years and concluded that HB 719 wouldn’t have prevented even that case. The court ultimately concluded that the State failed to show the requirement was reasonable and served its asserted interests, or that those interests were more important than the burden the requirement placed on voting. That matters because the right to vote is not a reward government gives us for navigating its paperwork perfectly. Government exists to serve the people. Our elections belong to the people. And when government imposes a barrier on a fundamental right, government should be able to explain what real problem that barrier solves. Here, the State failed to carry that burden. The government is accountable to us. Not the other way around. Last week, we wrote about the case involving Paul Rolfes. His estate alleges that police knew about his mental health disability, that Paul asked for a mental health professional while alone behind a bathroom door, and Last Week It Was Policing. This WeekIt’s Voting. that resources were available to respond to that request. The City asked the federal court to dismiss the federal disability discrimination claims. The court said no. That wasn’t a final decision about whether the allegations are true or whether the City ultimately violated federal law. But it meant the disability discrimination claims survived and get their day in court. The lesson we drew from that decision was: This week’s case involves very different facts and a different right. But together, these cases have me thinking about an even bigger idea: You can have rights under the ADA and still encounter a government system that fails to accommodate your disability. You can have a constitutional right to vote and still encounter a government process that keeps your ballot from counting. You can have a right to live in the community and still lack the services that make living there possible. So maybe the question isn’t simply whether we have rights. The more important question is: Can we actually use them? The answer is: Disability rights do not disappear when policeappear. Possessing a right and being able to exercise thatright are not the same thing. Rights aren’t the finish line. Freedom is. Because disabled people are voters. But there’s something larger here, too. The decisions government makes about how a system operates determine whether people can actually exercise the rights they’re supposed to have. Every form. Every deadline. Every eligibility requirement. Every verification process. Every additional box. Someone designed those things. And those choices can either make a right easier to exercise or put another barrier between a person and that right. Disabled people shouldn’t have to jump through hoops in order to exercise fundamental freedoms. I wrote that sentence last week. Well, here’s what that looks like. Why is Disability Rights Montanainvolved in a voting case? Systems Don’t Change Themselves.People Change Them. “The system” isn’t some mysterious machine humming away in a building somewhere. Systems are choices made by people. Someone writes the law. Someone creates the form. Someone decides what gets funded. Someone designs an election procedure, establishes a police protocol, decides what accommodations exist, or decides whether to listen when a disabled person says: “This doesn’t work.” And because people build systems, people can change them. Power takes different forms. A person tells their story. People discover the same thing is happening to others. Communities organize. Advocates document the pattern. Coalitions form. Voters demand better. Policymakers feel pressure. And sometimes lawyers go to court. None of those things stands alone. They build power together. A person’s experience reveals a problem. Community turns individual experience into shared knowledge. Public education makes the problem visible. Coalitions demonstrate that people expect change. Policy changes the rules. And when government violates people’s rights, the law gives us another tool for accountability. That’s how our community’s knowledge becomes our community’s power. And sometimes our community puts that power to work through Disability Rights Montana. I know. That’s a strange thing for the executive director of a legal advocacy organization to say in an email announcing that we just won a lawsuit. But it’s true. When I was a practicing lawyer, more times than I can count, my team and I fixed a situation without ever filing a case. I also won cases in court where, at the end of the day, very little changed in my clients’ lives. And I lost a couple of federal class actions while still getting my clients what they needed. So I mean it when I say: Winning lawsuits is NOT the goal. The goal is freedom. A Montana where disabled people can participate fully in the communities we belong to. Where someone experiencing a mental-health crisis can ask for an accommodation and that request matters. Where a paperwork mistake doesn’t cost someone their vote. Where we can choose where and how we live, and build lives as big as we want them to be. Where we can all: Work. Learn. Travel. We’re Not Trying to Win Lawsuits. Raise families. Make decisions about our own lives. Vote. Lead. Build community. And hold government accountable when it gets those things wrong. A favorable court order sitting in a lawyer’s file doesn’t accomplish freedom by itself. The law isn’t just something that happens to us. It is one tool our community can use to change the balance of power. And Disability Rights Montana will use it. We’ll organize. We’ll teach. We’ll investigate. We’ll build coalitions. We’ll show up at the Legislature. We’ll make hidden problems visible. We’ll put disabled people’s knowledge in rooms where decisions get made. And when that’s what it takes, we’ll go to court. Sometimes we’ll win there. Sometimes we’ll win somewhere else. Either way, the measure of our work isn’t the number of cases we’ve won. It’s whether disabled people have more power over our own lives. Court is a means. Freedom is the end. Our job, together, is to make that freedom real. In solidarity, David David Carlson, J.D. Executive Director Disability Rights Montana Last week’s court victory involved a very different question: what disability rights require when law enforcement responds to a person experiencing a mental-health crisis. If you missed it, read it here: p.s. BREAKING: MT Fed Court Order onDisability Rights + How We Change theSystem DAVID CARLSON ·OCT 1 MT Federal Court order affirms that disability rights do not disappear when police You’re currently a free subscriber to Life Beyond Compliance. Upgrading to paid subscriptions supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is no where near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! Upgrade to paid LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2026 Disability Rights Montana1022 Chestnut Street, Helena, MT 59601 Unsubscribe appear Read full story