An article in the New York Times discusses how a growing number of states are seeking to either expand or restrict voting rights based on a person’s mental competence. Currently, the states’ restrictions vary in scope and enforcement, and officials are grappling to clarify laws as America grows increasingly unglued and demented by the day.
Key to the issue are the voting rights of the non compos mentis (not master of one’s own mind), who are typically Republican, except for the paranoid schizophrenics (Libertarian) and the pyromaniacs (Democrat). In Missouri, advocates for the mentally ill have sued the state to secure voting rights for these non compos mentis citizens who understand the nature and effect of voting, which civil rights experts feel should be the national standard for the issue.
Then there’s states like Rhode Island, where convicted felons lose their right to vote, but those who are found “not guilty by reason of insanity” do not. One man is crusading to remove two such criminally insane murderers from the voting rolls on the grounds that they are “nuts” even though both men have the mental capacity to vote.
Other states are simply modernizing their laws. In New Jersey, the state constitution may be amended to replace language forbidding an “idiot or insane” person to vote, under the grounds that 90% of the population was effectively disenfranchised.
(Oh, I know… it’s way too easier to pick on poor, deranged New Jersey, and it’s unfair. Evidence of our national mental decay is all over the newspaper every day. We are waging an insane war at a great cost to ourselves. We are destroying our world’s environment without little regard to the future. We care more about our politicians’ religions than their commitment to education and health care. We suffer from collective anxiety, paranoia, exhibitionism, amnesia, body dysmorphic disorder, delirium, and addiction. And yet we are concerned that elderly citizens with Alzheimer’s disease are going to try to vote. What are we afraid of? That we might re-elect Eisenhower?)
