Did You Help Someone With Dementia Vote In This Election?

When we talk about decision-making capacity among people with Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of dementia, we're often thinking about the capacity to make choices about health care, finances, and living arrangements. But on Election Day, another kind of decision making comes into play: voting.

This is a tricky subject with no easy answers. Individuals with dementia experience a decline in decision-making skills over time, but the rate of decline varies considerably, and some abilities may diminish while others remain intact. When it comes to voting, whether or not people with dementia are capable of doing so probably depends more on their current level of awareness about election choices than on their ability to actually complete a ballot without assistance.

People with dementia should be given the opportunity to vote if they still have the capacity to do so. But who makes that decision? The person with dementia? The caregiver? A doctor? A judge? Again, there are no straightforward answers here. One danger is that people with dementia who are still capable of voting will be unfairly excluded from the process. Another danger is that people with dementia who lack the capacity to vote will become victims of voting fraud.

I know caregivers who have helped their relatives fill out ballots because their loved ones asked to vote and appeared to understand the choices they were making. Other caregivers have told me that they helped their spouse or parent vote because they knew how the person would have wanted to vote if dementia wasn't a factor.

Keep in mind that the two scenarios I just described are quite different. Are they both right, wrong, or neither? What would you do, or what have you done in this election?

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