Mental Disability and the Right to Vote.

Abstract

Nearly forty states disfranchise people based on their mental status. Despite the patchwork of laws limiting the voting rights of people with mental disabilities, one of America’s largest minority groups, few researchers have investigated the constitutional strategy utilized for disenfranchisement or the subsequent legal challenges that arose. Through a fine-grained analysis of constitutional and legislative debates, court cases, trade documents, newspapers, and petitions, from the beginning of these suffrage restrictions to the enactment of the 19th Amendment, I describe a “common sense” disability model – the methodology behind barring people with alleged mental disabilities from the franchise. I consider how and why state legislators prohibited individuals’ right to vote based on mental capacity in state statutes and constitutions. I show that two groups –African Americans, and women – were labeled as unfit for suffrage and full political citizenship because of their assumed mental deficiencies, and how each of these groups deployed their own definitions of mental capacity as they fought for the franchise. I then examine the subsequent court and congressional challenges involving people alleged to have voted despite their being judged to lack the necessary mental capacity. I conclude by reflecting on the changed landscape of the twentieth century, as statutory provisions such as the American with Disabilities Act and the Voting Rights Act, and political movements such as the disability rights movement challenged the exclusion of the disempowered from the franchise.