NYT: It's OK To 'Help' Mentally Incapacitated Relatives With Ballots

The New York Times encouraged a reader last week to “help” a 97-year-old woman with advanced memory loss — who is “becoming nearly impossible to communicate with” — to complete her ballot. 

“When the situation is hazy, my inclination would be to err on the side of helping someone to vote, because voting is such a central form of civic participation,” wrote the Times’ “Ethicist” Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The Problem

A reader wrote the Times, saying the grandmother has “advanced” Alzheimer’s and hearing loss. The reader wanted to know if it would be “unethical” to help the elderly woman vote in November, likely having the grandma do “the mechanics of voting” while family members “advise her.”

The reader claimed to have helped the grandmother fill out her absentee ballot in 2020.

“She held the pen while we did our best to explain each office and issue. If there was any confusion, we would tell her how we voted, and she would do the same,” the reader wrote. “Is it unethical to help her vote again this November?”

The reader wrote that the elderly woman’s “cognition was in decline four years ago, but it was not as degraded as it is now.”

“I foresee things playing out similarly to the last general election, in which she performs the mechanics of voting while we advise her,” the reader wrote. “Before her illness, we were familiar enough with her political opinions to be reasonably confident about whom and what she would vote for. But I’m also conscious of the fact that the line between assistance and coercion is blurred in this situation.”

Possibly Illegal Advice

Appiah responded by splitting hairs — at first. 

“If your grandmother is still able to check the boxes and sign the ballot as an expression of her choices, she’s just doing what anybody else does. Under those circumstances, she’s entitled to vote with your assistance,” wrote Appiah. “If she doesn’t understand what she’s doing, though, she isn’t really voting; voting is the expression of a political choice, and it would be wrong to record a vote that didn’t reflect her actual choices.”

When the matter is unclear, though, Appiah advised to “err on the side of helping someone to vote,” claiming its high importance to “civic participation.” 

New York state law classifies anyone who “votes or offers or attempts to vote at an election under any other name than his own” and anyone who “aids in doing or attempting to do a fraudulent act in connection with an early mail or absentee vote cast or attempted to be cast,” as a perpetrator of “illegal voting.”

New York law also bars those “adjudged incompetent by order of a court of competent judicial authority” from registering to vote.

“Various states exclude citizens from voting when they are under guardianship or have been judged to be incompetent, but it won’t do to shut out people with mild cognitive impairments,” Appiah said. “For your grandmother, as for so many people around the world, the simple act of voting may have greater significance than whatever choices it conveys.”

In the 2020 presidential race, the Wisconsin Elections Commission broke state law, allowing staff in a Racine County nursing home to help fill out ballots on behalf of residents, many of whom had severe memory issues.

An investigation revealed nursing home employees would “ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party,” as The Federalist previously reported. Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said at the time that an “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.”

The Federalist asked Appiah if he was concerned his guidance might lead people to inadvertently break election laws, but he did not comment in time for publication.

Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.