My Grandma Has Dementia. Should I Help Her Vote?

My grandma has relatively advanced Alzheimer’s disease and hearing loss. At 97, she’s still present enough to recognize her loved ones and enjoy our company, but it’s becoming nearly impossible to communicate with her.

In the 2020 general election, she obtained an absentee ballot, and her immediate family members, including me, helped her fill it out. (Her cognition was in decline four years ago, but it was not as degraded as it is now.) As I remember it, 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.

Is it unethical to help her vote again this November? I foresee things playing out similarly to the last general election, in which she performs the mechanics of voting while we advise her. Though she’s not exactly an ideologue, my grandma has always been a voter. 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. — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

Anyone may seek — and act on — advice about how to vote. That includes asking other people how they have voted and choosing to do likewise. 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. 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.

What to do when it’s simply unclear whether she’s expressing a view? 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. After all, there’s a great distance between the ideal of civic responsibility (in which you reflect carefully on how an electoral outcome would affect the district, the state, the country, the world) and what you’re entitled to do when voting. Political scientists can marvel at what so-called low-information voters don’t know without thinking that such people should be disenfranchised.

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. I’ll also note that in our polarized polity, many people aligned with either of the two major parties think that the choices of people aligned with the other one are not merely ill considered but make no rational sense. From their perspective, your grandmother, however impaired, would be far from an outlier. It remains the case that a broad franchise and regular elections are better for social peace than any available alternative. And 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.