"A staggerint two-thirds of those with serious mental illness end up homeless at some point during their lives."
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Also, little attention has been paid to deciding what kinds of voting assistance are appropriate for people with cognitive impairments. Many people suffering from dementia require assistance from caregivers, who perform activities of daily life ranging from balancing their finances to making decisions regarding their medical care. Caregivers invariably need to address issues surrounding the role they play in helping patients to vote. However, the link between making voting easier and making fraud and coercion more likely must be carefully considered.
Some forms of assistance are legally impermissible. For example, it is illegal for a family caregiver to vote on a person’s behalf as a proxy decision-maker. As Dr. Jason Karlawish, director of the Voting Rights and Dementia Project at the University of Pennsylvania, points out: “Unlike medical and financial decisions, the act of voting in a democratic polity is an incident of citizenship and an inalienable right. Citizenship creates certain obligations and opportunities that cannot be delegated, such as submitting to military draft or serving on a jury.”
Although the secret ballot is the norm in the United States, federal law now permits people to have assistance when voting, though this assistance has largely been tailored to those with physical rather than mental disabilities. While the secret ballot reduces the risk of coercion by organized groups such as unions, employers, and political machines, it also has the effect of disenfranchising many individuals who need assistance to vote. Permitting an assistant to common technique of absentee ballot fraud involves third parties’ casting ballots in the name of individuals who remain on registration rolls but who, for whatever reason, do not seek to vote themselves. Thus, individuals whose mental deterioration has left them unable to vote provide a pool of potentially usable votes for third parties to exploit. To reduce this risk, more long term care facilities could host polling stations, so that seniors would not have to rely on absentee ballots.
Critics of current legislation have urged that blanket determination of an individual’s mental incapacity – perhaps because the person requires a guardian – should be replaced by adjudications of specific competence for voting. To disenfranchise an individual, a court would have to find that he lacked the capacity to vote, not merely that he was generally incompetent. However, several problems militate against
Justin Ross is a sophomore in Trumbull College