Aging Voters Need Ballot Protection

April 05, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 5, 2007 – Sacramento, CA
Contact:
Mike Curran
University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law
3200 Fifth Avenue
Sacramento, CA 95817
916-739-7115

The Capital Center for Government Law and Policy at University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law hosted a working symposium from March 21-24 on the topic of “Facilitating Voting As People Age: Implications of Cognitive Impairment” that featured 50 national experts in law and aging, medicine, long-term care, voting technology, and elections administration.

The invitation-only conference addressed critical issues of growing importance in light of the country’s exploding elderly population and the increased incidence of dementia and other cognitive impairments. Subjects addressed included the relationship between age-related cognitive impairments and broader issues of access to voting, absentee balloting, voting in long-term care settings, defining and assessing capacity to vote, and the implications of voter technology.

The legal experts fashioned a number of recommendations intended to protect voting rights of people with legal capacity and provide necessary assistance in voting, while protecting the integrity of the voting process.

Among other things, the recommendations call for:

  • Retention of the right to vote until and unless an individual is specifically determined to lack capacity to vote by a judge in a proceeding with due process protections;
  • Requiring election officials to conduct mobile polling at long-term care facilities for those residents unable to travel to polling locations; and
  • Movement toward the goal of well-tested universal design in voting technology so that all voters at a given polling place, including those with cognitive impairments, can easily and accurately cast votes on the same type of system.

Edward D. Spurgeon, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law and the Gordon D. Schaber Chair in Health Law and Policy, and Charles Sabatino, Director of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging in Washington, D.C., led the planning committee that organized the event.

Each of the conference recommendations, along with the six working papers that formed the basis of the group’s deliberations and the keynote address of Vermont Secretary of State and head of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Deborah Markowitz, will be published this summer in a special symposium issue of the McGeorge Law Review.