Science & Tech Quote by DeForest Soaries

There is a quiet sales pitch baked into Soaries's bureaucratic cadence: accessibility framed not as a civil right, but as a functional upgrade the system can no longer postpone. The phrase "Beyond that" signals a checklist mentality - compliance culture - yet what follows lands on something intimate: the right to vote in private. He’s not talking about abstract participation; he’s talking about dignity, about removing the small humiliations that come from having to ask a stranger to mark your ballot.

The subtext is coalition-building through pragmatism. By spotlighting "physically handicapped" voters and then narrowing to "particularly, the blind", Soaries gives policymakers a concrete beneficiary and a clear technological fix. He’s making modernization feel morally necessary and administratively reasonable at the same time. The machine isn’t pitched as sexy innovation; it’s pitched as a tool that reduces friction, liability, and bad optics. That word "possible" does a lot of work: it implies the old system made privacy impossible, or at least precarious, without directly accusing states of exclusion.

Context matters. Soaries is best known for chairing the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in the post-2000 recount era, when "electronic voting machines" carried the double charge of reform and suspicion. His focus here triangulates around the Help America Vote Act moment: federal money, federal standards, and a national anxiety that elections were both outdated and fragile. The line is an attempt to anchor all that controversy in an unarguable human case - if the technology helps the blind vote independently, resistance starts to look less like fiscal caution and more like indifference.