IFES and Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council, known as the CSE, are beginning a pilot program to conduct a census of citizens with disabilities in 35 municipalities around the country. The census will provide election officials with accurate information about the size of disabled populations and identify their specific needs in order to increase their participation in elections.

The new project builds upon a program that IFES conducted in Nicaragua last year that succeeding in getting ten times more voters with disabilities to cast ballots in the 2006 presidential elections than previous polls. The program focused primarily on building more than 250 ramps to help voters with physical impairment access polling sites, in many cases for the first time.

Despite overcoming physical barriers, Nicaraguans with disabilities face far more substantive obstacles to their equitable participation. The Nicaraguan government does not know precisely how many of its citizens live with a disability, making it difficult to provide adequate services. The country’s National Institute of Statistics and Census estimates that at least 10 percent of the population has a disability, and the number of citizens with disabilities is growing by almost 3 percent a year.

To provide more accurate data, IFES brought together election officials and local disability rights organizations earlier this year to form a National Commission for the Promotion of Disabled Voting. This commission is working closely with the Nicaraguan Government’s National Commission for Reintegration and Rehabilitation on the census project which targets municipalities that were heavily affected by the guerilla fighting in the 1980s and, as a result, are thought to have large populations of voters with disabilities.

A census taker studies a manual IFES prepared for her training workshop.

In support of the project, IFES recruited five technicians with experience in census operations to develop a census methodology and instructional materials for training census takers. Those technicians are now training up to 245 census takers in the 35 municipalities. Once trained, IFES will coordinate census takers’ work and oversee the collection of the data they gather into a central database.

IFES believes the database will help Nicaragua’s election administrators identify which voting precincts need special provisions, such as Braille ballots for a precinct with a large concentration of voters with visual impairments or a ground floor polling place in a precinct with voters in wheelchairs. The database will also help officials prepare for other stages of the electoral process, such as providing mobile registration officers who can register voters with disabilities in or near their homes.

To encourage citizens with disabilities to participate in the census, IFES and the CSE will air a series of radio spots on national and local radio stations through the end of the census-taking activities in late October.