Ron Paul supporters will be terrified if this goes through

Ron Paul supporters are shuddering in fear at the thought they might be considered too insane to vote by legislators debating the issue in various states.

From the New York Times comes this article, which if it wasn't true you'd think was a parody from The Onion.

CRANSTON, R.I. — Behind the barbed wire and thick walls of the state mental hospital here are two patients who have not been allowed to live in the outside world for 20 years. Both were found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

Still, they have voted in elections nearly every two years, casting ballots by mail. Now, however, election officials are taking steps that could ban them from voting, arguing that state law denies the vote to people with such serious psychiatric impairments.

“I just think if you are declared insane you should not be allowed to vote, period,” said Joseph DeLorenzo, chairman of the Cranston Board of Canvassers. “Some people are taking these two clowns and calling them disabled persons. Is insanity a disability? I have an answer to that: no. You’re insane; you’re nuts.”

Rhode Island is among a growing number of states grappling with the question of who is too mentally impaired to vote.

As I said, Ron Paul supporters are shaking in their boots at losing the right to vote.

The issue is drawing attention for two major reasons: increasing efforts by the mentally ill and their advocates to secure voting rights, and mounting concern by psychiatrists and others who work with the elderly about the rights and risks of voting by people with conditions like Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.

This summer, recommendations for national standards will be released by a group of psychiatrists, lawyers and others led by the American Bar Association, suggesting that people be prevented from voting only if they cannot indicate, with or without help, “a specific desire to participate in the voting process.”

The fact that the American Bar Association, representative of the Democratic Party's largest contributor base - trial lawyers, is in favour of the move should immediately raise suspicion levels though there is an argument that given Democratic electoral rolls are filled with the names of dead people and that Democrats don't want people to have to show driver's licences when voting that they'd naturally see the insane as potentially their demographic.

Some state skirmishes involve efforts to ease restrictions, while others involve specific cases that compel officials to clarify old laws.

And with research showing that many people with dementia or other impairments vote or want to, there is also a desire to ensure they are not pressured to vote certain ways.

“There’s a lot of people out there who either don’t have adequate access to the ballot and should, or could be vulnerable to overreaching political types who want to take advantage of their votes to swing an election,” said Charles Sabatino, director of the commission on law and aging at the bar association.

In Missouri, advocates for the mentally ill have sued the state, trying to make it easier for people under guardianship for mental incapacity to vote.

Are things so good for the mentally ill now that all they have left is to lobby for their right to vote? It makes you wonder whether the advocates aren't suffering from some derangement themselves.

New Jersey may put on the November ballot an amendment to the state’s Constitution to replace language forbidding an “idiot or insane person” to vote. Advocates for the disabled want those words removed but worry that replacement language is so vague it could be unfairly restrictive. They want to allow people to vote if they can supply information for a voter registration form.

An 8 year old can supply that information. If someone has a car accident, is mentally retarded from birth or has dementia that results in them having a mental age of 8 then if they're allowed to vote why can't an 8 year old?

In Maine, a federal ruling a few years ago said a constitutional provision, twice affirmed by referendum, was discriminatory because it barred voting by people under guardianship for mental illness.

And you know that the discrimination lobby has run off the end of the reality runway when they want to take action on the grounds of discrimination against the mentally impaired. Last time I checked, the mentally impaired suffered from...mental impairment.

Recent local elections in Alabama, South Carolina and elsewhere have included accusations of ballots cast on behalf of nursing home residents who were incompetent to vote. In New Jersey, a nursing home employee who won a 2004 election to a county Democratic committee stepped down because her victory resulted from absentee ballots cast by the nursing home residents.

Seriously. The amount of vote rigging that the Democratic Party gets up to is amazing. It makes the result of the 2000 election all the more ironic, especially given Al Gore tried to have the postal votes from those serving in the armed forces not counted.

State laws vary and are inconsistently applied, said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director for the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group in Washington. Ms. Mathis said most states fell into one of two categories. About 18 bar voting by people under guardianship or who are “non compos mentis” (“not master of one’s own mind”), a determination that is often not clearly defined. Another 18 prevent voting if there is a specific determination that people lack voting competence.

Rhode Island’s case concerns William Sarmento, institutionalized after he claimed Satan had ordered him to kill two boys, ages 6 and 9, and John A. Sarro, charged in the throat-slashing of a man in a bar restroom, and later with killing another psychiatric patient.

You gotta watch that Satan. You never know which way he's going to vote.

If the men had been convicted and imprisoned, they would be unable to vote; only Maine and Vermont allow jailed felons to vote.

Last October, Edward Desautel, a restaurant manager running for the Rhode Island House of Representatives, learned that Mr. Sarro and Mr. Sarmento were on the voting rolls. He wrote the three-member Board of Canvassers, arguing “we don’t need the additional burden of worrying whether an incompetent child murderer’s vote might affect the outcome of a close School Committee or other local race.”

In an interview, Mr. Desautel said, “If you’re criminally insane, even if you’re found not guilty, you still shouldn’t be able to vote.”

Mr. DeLorenzo said he was “ready to remove them from the voting list,” but because the House election had been so close, the American Civil Liberties Union intervened, saying more notice was required for a hearing. (Mr. Desautel lost by 1,700 votes.)

In March, the canvassers notified Mr. Sarro and Mr. Sarmento that their voting rights were being reviewed, and a hearing is expected soon. The canvassers cite a state constitutional provision that a person “lawfully adjudicated to be non compos mentis” cannot vote.

Better not give that 'compos mentis' test to Ron Paul supporters...

Kate Sherlock and Kate Bowden, lawyers from the Rhode Island Disability Law Center, representing the hospitalized men, say “non compos mentis” is different from “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

The latter “means they were not found to form the specific intent required for the crime,” Ms. Sherlock said. “It does not address an individual’s capacity to vote in any way.”

Mr. DeLorenzo cited semiannual doctors’ evaluations saying the men should remain hospitalized. Ms. Bowden said the evaluations considered “dangerousness, not capacity to vote.”

Dr. Barry Wall, director of the forensic service at the mental hospital, said the hospital encouraged voting when possible. “We think of it as part of their treatment, to try to move them closer to society,” Dr. Wall said.

Through lawyers, Mr. Sarro, 52, said, “I’ve been voting a long time now, and it’s important to me.” Mr. Sarmento, 40, said: “I read the paper just about every day. I’m aware of what is going on in the world. I care about voting.”

Well if it's so important then maybe they should have thought about that before committing their evil atrocities.

The Missouri lawsuit seeks to end what it calls a state voting ban for people under full guardianship because of mental illness. Missouri’s attorney general’s office says the law lets judges allow voting in individual cases. A court ruled for the state, but the case is being appealed.

David C., 26, of Fayette, Mo., who asked that his last name be withheld, said he had been prevented from voting because he was under guardianship, although he had distributed campaign fliers and lobbied a state senator about issues like Medicaid.

Sebastian Go of St. Peters, Mo., under guardianship because of bipolar disorder, Asperger’s syndrome and brain injury, registered to vote and researched races when he turned 18 last September, said his guardian and grandmother, Linda Clarke. But the day Mr. Go received his voting card he also got a letter saying he could not vote because he had been declared mentally incapacitated.

“He has to have someone manage his money for him and make his medical decisions,” Ms. Clarke said. “But Sebastian is able to make a political decision.”

This person is clearly a Democrat, as he has political opinions but doesn't worry about money.

Mr. Go said he considered voting “my duty as an American citizen,” adding “I have an opinion on the outside world, on who’s governor, who’s senator, who’s president. And that one vote could count.”

The 2001 ruling in Maine, allowing people to vote if they understood the nature and effect of voting and could make a choice, was considered a model. How to assess such qualifications, however, is controversial.

“To fail to have any standard that requires a person to have a grasp of what the process is all about would degrade the voting process,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatry professor who was a leader of a study that asked Alzheimer’s patients to choose between hypothetical candidates and describe how elections work.

Some advocates for the mentally ill object to such questions, however, saying they exceed what most prospective voters are asked.

“The question asked of you when you go to vote is, Have you registered,” said Sally Hurme, a senior project manager for AARP, an association for older Americans. “Why should your next-door neighbor be given a greater barrier to voting than you just because they have a medical diagnosis?”

So far, in Maine “basically now there is no restriction,” said Melissa Packard, the state’s director of elections. “We don’t require local registrars to determine if they think the person understands the voting process.”

If these people don't understand the voting process then they're not going to understand what's going on at election time and simply not vote at all, regardless of their legal right to do so. The fact that there are advocates to allow them to vote demonstrates that Ron Paul supporters and at least one side of politics realise that they can affect the outcome of elections by taking bus loads of mentally ill people to the polling stations. You already see the support from the mentally ill in online polls for Ron Paul. Who's to say that won't translate come election time?