Suffrage for People with Intellectual Disabilities and Mental Illness: Observations on a Civic Controversy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mental Disability and the Right to Vote
Yale LJ, 1979
Nearly forty states disfranchise people based on their mental status. Despite the patchwork of laws limiting the voting rights of people with mental disabilities, one of America's largest minority groups, few researchers have investigated the constitutional strategy utilized for disenfranchisement or the subsequent legal challenges that arose. Through a fine-grained analysis of constitutional and legislative debates, court cases, trade documents, newspapers, and petitions, from the beginning of these suffrage restrictions to the enactment of the 19 th Amendment, I describe a "common sense" disability model-the methodology behind barring people with alleged mental disabilities from the franchise. I consider how and why state legislators prohibited individuals' right to vote based on mental capacity in state statutes and constitutions. I show that two groups-African Americans, and women-were labeled as unfit for suffrage and full political citizenship because of their assumed mental deficiencies, and how each of these groups deployed their own definitions of mental capacity as they fought for the franchise. I then examine the subsequent court and congressional challenges involving people alleged to have voted despite their being judged to lack the necessary mental capacity. I conclude by reflecting on the changed landscape of the twentieth century, as statutory provisions such as the American with Disabilities Act viii and the Voting Rights Act, and political movements such as the disability rights movement challenged the exclusion of the disempowered from the franchise. 2 An increasing number of articles note contemporary difficulties for people with mental disabilities who wish to vote.
Contemporary Voting Rights Controversies Through the Lens of Disability
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
People with disabilities are the ticking time bomb of the electorate. An estimated thirty to thirty-five percent of all voters in the next twenty-five years will need some form of accommodation. Despite the significant and growing population of voters with disabilities, they do not vote in proportion to their numbers. We can consider voters with disabilities as "the canaries in the coal mine," the people who are an advanced warning of the structural difficulties in voting not just for themselves, but also for the system as a whole. Solving problems in voting for people with disabilities will strengthen the entire system and will help improve the voting process for everyone, especially people from disempowered communities. Furthermore, although election law scholars have largely ignored the unique voting problems confronting voters with disabilities, virtually every major voting controversy in contemporary American electoral politics directly implicates issues of disability.
Social Policy and Society, 13 (2), 2014
"People with cognitive impairments are regularly denied access to the vote in democratic nations. At the same time, the accuracy of legal regulations is uncertain due to the variety of legal classifications and the vague administrative procedures envisaged for their implementation. This article offers an extensive analysis of the accuracy of legal restrictions on the vote for people with cognitive impairments in all electoral democracies. The article argues that the prospect of ever regulating the vote accurately, in the sense of avoiding both misclassifications and arbitrary administration of restrictions, is difficult to envisage. In the face of the regulatory problems associated with the attempt to restrict the vote for people with cognitive impairment, it is concluded that enfranchisement of all adult citizens would constitute an improvement."
Contemporary Political Theory, 2022
In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting-respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not justify such support-although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care -- but not necessarily surrogate voting.
Facilitating an Equal Right to Vote for Persons with Disabilities
Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2014
Historically and contemporaneously, persons with disabilities have been excluded from exercising their human rights, including the right to political participation. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities responds to this circumstance and provides a holistic solution. Article 29 addresses the design and implementation of an electoral process that is non-discriminatory, while also requiring states to provide voters with disability-related accommodations and other facilitative measures to enable their equal right to vote. Yet to date, what little attention has been paid to the voting rights of disabled persons has focused on the validity and scope of exclusions, and neither courts nor legislators have turned to the positive side of the ledger, namely, how to enable individuals with disabilities to exercise their franchise. Emerging practices around the globe nonetheless bear out that persons with disabilities can be successfully incorporated in all phases of an electoral process. Further, they can perform a variety of roles beyond exercising the franchise-as voter educators, election commissioners, observers, monitors and committee members, and as candidates. The article reflects evolving state policies and practices by disabled people's organizations, and draws on our experience working in this field to provide guidance for disability inclusion throughout the ongoing process of pre-electoral, electoral and post-electoral phases that comprise the electoral cycle.