Voters with Dementia
The WaPost's Shankar Vedantam reports on a difficult legal dilemma: Should people who've lost their minds to Alzheimer's or other dementia be able to vote, particularly when they're concentrated in swing states like Florida?
Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.
"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House.
As swing states with large elderly populations such as Florida gear up for another presidential election, a sleeper issue has been gaining attention on medical, legal and political radar screens: Many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in elections -- including through absentee ballot. Although there are no national statistics, two studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island found that patients at dementia clinics turned out in higher numbers than the general population
About 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, the most common cause of dementia. Florida alone has 455,000 patients, advocates estimate.
While it's easy to say patients with dementia shouldn't be able to vote, the story makes clear how difficult drawing such lines would be. But reports like that do start to enforce a social stigma: You are a bad citizen if you are voting twice by taking advantage of your loved one's or client's dementia.