Mental Disability and the Right to Vote (original) (raw)
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Most electoral democracies, including forty-three states in the United States, deny people the right to vote on the basis of intellectual disability or mental illness. Scholars in several fields have addressed these disenfranchisements, including legal scholars who analyze their validity under U.S. constitutional law and international-human-rights law, philosophers and political scientists who analyze their validity under democratic theory, and mental-health researchers who analyze their relationship to scientific categories. This Note reviews the current state of the debate across these fields and makes three contentions: (a) pragmatic political considerations have blurred the distinction between disenfranchisement provisions based on cognitive capacity and those based on personal status; (b) proposals that advocate voting by proxy trivialize the broad civic purpose of the franchise; and (c) the persistence of disenfranchisement on the basis of mental illness inevitably contributes to silencing socially disfavored views and lifestyles. Accordingly, the Note cautions reformers against advocating for capacity assessment or proxy voting, and emphasizes the importance of disassociating the idea of mental illness from voting capacity. * New York University Law School, J.D. expected 2017.
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.
Disability and election administration in the United States: barriers and improvements
Policy Studies, 2020
Although people with disabilities are considerably less likely to vote than those without a disability, empirical explanations as to why remain underdeveloped. The present study investigates whether this discrepancy in turnout rates is directly related to voting procedures. Analyzing data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we assess the ways in which people with disabilities are disenfranchised by election administration barriers. Specifically, we identify how experiences with voter registration, voter identification regulations, and methods of ballot submission impact those with and without disabilities. Also considered is the degree to which disability affects one’s own political competence and political interest. Reflecting on these findings, we offer recommendations for reducing such electoral hurdles and providing pathways by which comprehensive political incorporation of all individuals with disabilities might be achieved.
The Puzzling Place of Disability in Political Science
Disability studies emerged in the 1980s as part of a cluster of politicized identity-based interdisciplinary fields of study in race, ethnicity, and gender that theorized and sought to actualize greater inclusion in academia and society writ large. Political science, however, has been slow to incorporate critical studies of identity and lacks critical sustained engagement with disability. This paper seeks to fill this disciplinary lacunae. I draw from recent theorizing within disability studies and political science to develop a framework for examining how disability structures politics and, in turn, how politics structures disability. I then illustrate the ways in which engagement between disability studies and political science can appropriately center disability within politics and deepen our understanding of political conflict in the United States.
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.
Ensuring the Enfranchisement of People With Disabilities
Journal of Disability Policy Studies, 2009
In a representational democracy, the process of selecting people to represent the electorate is critical. To accomplish this goal, it is crucial that elections be fair and accurate reflections of the decisions of the voters. However, a significant and relatively unacknowledged constituency, people with disabilities, faces a variety of barriers to full participation in the U.S. electoral democracy. Recent research has provided evidence that how people with disabilities vote is just as important as the physical barriers they face when casting their votes. This article presents an overview of the literature addressing issues that affect how people with disabilities vote, with an especial focus on the role of election officials as both facilitators and inhibitors of voting by people with disabilities.
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."
Disability and Domination: Lessons from Republican Political Philosophy
Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2018
The republican ideal of non-domination identifies the capacity for arbitrary interference as a fundamental threat to liberty that can generate fearful uncertainty and servility in those dominated. I argue that republican accounts of domination can provide a powerful analysis of the nature of legal and institutional power that is encountered by people with mental disorders or cognitive disabilities. In doing so, I demonstrate that non-domination is an ideal which is pertinent, distinctive, and desirable in thinking through psychological disability. Finally, I evaluate republican strategies for contesting domination, focusing on the limits of contestatory democracy, and proposing a participatory alternative which better addresses problems of political agency in the mentally disordered and cognitively disabled. Note: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Tom O'Shea, 'Disability and Domination: Lessons from Civic Republicanism', Journal of Applied Philosophy (forthcoming). This article may be used for non-commercial purposes. Please cite the published version.