Dementia and the Voter

For some reason I got a funny feeling when I read this article from the Washington Post,
Allowing caregivers to accompany dementia patients into the both and vote for them, and this is not uncommon?
�Uhm�

Dementia and the Voter
Research Raises Ethical, Constitutional Questions

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 14, 2004; Page A01

Florida neurologist Marc Swerdloff was taken aback when one of his patients with advanced dementia voted in the 2000 presidential election. The man thought it was 1942 and Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The patient's wife revealed that she had escorted her husband into the booth.

"I said 'Did he pick?' and she said 'No, I picked for him,' " Swerdloff said. "I felt bad. She essentially voted twice" in the Florida election, which gave George W. Bush a 537-vote victory and the White House more

the amount of people with dementia / Alzheimer�s disease is about 4.5 million in the U.S.
Florida alone has 455,00 patients.

I don�t know if these numbers are high or the norm, if there is a normal amount, but IMO I think something is wrong with the numbers, as being high, I have not done any research on the matter but I believe the majority are men who served in the Armies of the Second World War, my father-in-law is one, he was in the Canadian Army during the war, and spent his retirement years in Florida, he now has Alzheimer�s and the Canadian Government just finished a new hospital about two years ago for Canadian Military personnel who suffer from dementia / Alzheimer�s, my point the Canadian Government building a hospital strictly for X-military with dementia / Alzheimer�s seems strange to me, mind you I�m glad the have, it must be needed, do the western governments know something there not telling.

Absentee ballots went out last week everywhere. You can request them if you're overseas now too.

The reason it's relevant to this issue, is alot of Nursing Homes "help" patients in this same manner. Not only ensuring they do vote, but their way.

Also, TrueLies has a post about Falwell telling people to vote Bush because God told him so. If anyone believes that, that's proof enough of dementia too IMO.