The New York Times encouraged a reader last week to “help” a 97-year-old woman with advanced memory loss — who is “becoming nearly impossible to communicate with” — to complete her ballot.
“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,” wrote the Times’ “Ethicist” Columnist Kwame Anthony Appiah.
The Problem
A reader wrote the Times, saying the grandmother has “advanced” Alzheimer’s and hearing loss. The reader wanted to know if it would be “unethical” to help the elderly woman vote in November, likely having the grandma do “the mechanics of voting” while family members “advise her.”
The reader claimed to have helped the grandmother fill out her absentee ballot in 2020.
“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,” the reader wrote. “Is it unethical to help her vote again this November?”
The reader wrote that the elderly woman’s “cognition was in decline four years ago, but it was not as degraded as it is now.”
“I foresee things playing out similarly to the last general election, in which she performs the mechanics of voting while we advise her,” the reader wrote. “Before her illness, we were familiar enough with her political opinions to be reasonably confident about whom and what she would vote
