A story yesterday in the Florida Times Union dredges up a troubling thought as the nation votes today. In Florida, if not elsewhere, poll officials hand the voter, after he/she has voted, a little sticker for his/her shirt with the words “I voted.” When a Jacksonville woman went to visit her mother at a nursing home during the interval of early voting, she noticed that her mother was wearing one of these stickers. Since her mother suffered from severe dementia, the daughter was curious about this and tested her political knowledge by asking her who was in the White House. The answer: LBJ. She then asked her for whom she had voted, she said “somebody named Oba-rama or something like that.”
When questioned about this, the Duval County Supervisor of Elections said that the demented woman’s voting was in response to an “out-reach” to nursing homes designed to encourage voting among the elderly. Although the Supervisor indicated there may be a problem in allowing demented people to vote, he said there is no legal impediment to voting on the basis of mental competency. A person associated with an advocacy program for people who are mentally ill says that “not understanding the issues” is not a bar to voting for people who are not mentally incapacitated, and asks why this should be a bar to their voting.
A profound question that. How many of the people whom we badger to vote as a “civic duty” when many do not “understand the issues” are contributing to an electoral process devoid of rational content to the voter’s choices? How many are going to “understand the issues” involved in their yes or no votes (in Florida) on six constitutional amendments? For that matter, how many are going to “understand the issues” of the presidential election when any glimmer of understanding comes to them from endless repetitions of 30-second TV commercials and glossy mailers depicting opponents as monsters and as indifferent to the expectations of “the people?” And for another matter, how many educated and (supposedly) intelligent people “understand the issues” in a presidential campaign largely devoid of any real “issues” since both parties represent the point of views of the same corporate power structure? So really, how is the demented woman in Jacksonville so much less competent than her supposedly un-demented fellow Americans?
Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist
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