13 months ago
MANTECA, CA - Parents of developmentally disabled adults in San Joaquin County say staff members at a care facility overstepped their bounds by registering clients to vote.
"I have an issue with them going behind my back. It was wrong," said Rod Homen. Homen's daughter Shelley, 26, spends the day at CAPS PLUS in Manteca but lives at home with him in Escalon.
Homen said Shelley has the intellectual capacity of a seven-year-old. He discovered she had voted absentee after paperwork arrived at the house from the county registrar.
The mother of another CAPS PLUS client was equally outraged. "It really made me mad," said Diana Hanson.
"She doesn't understand it. She's not mentally capable of voting," said Hanson of her daughter Kara, 23, who has Down Syndrome.
CAPS PLUS assistant program director Nicole Gowan said all 70 clients were offered the opportunity to register, but fewer than half chose to do so.
"As adults we have the right to vote and those individuals who were interested in registering to vote were provided with the materials necessary to do so," Gowan told News10.
A similar issue came up earlier in the week at a care facility in Sonora. Some parents of clients at the Thumbs Up! center objected to their adult children voting without their consent.
Although clients at both facilities appeared to have voted overwhelmingly Democratic, staff facilities insisted they did not coerce clients into registering and did not influence their votes.
"That would be unethical," said Gowan at the CAPS PLUS center.
The California Republican Party has called for an investigation on organized voting campaigns involving developmentally disabled adults. But Gowan pointed out the staff member who taught the citizenship class at her center is actually a Republican.
A disability rights group that conducted voting seminars at the Sonora center and other facilities issued a statement in response to the Republican challenge.
It is an outrage that in 2008, as all Americans proceed to the polls for this critical election, some groups are still challenging the right of people with developmental disabilities to vote," said Marinda Reed, coordinator of the developmental disability peer training unit of Disability Rights California.
Rod Homen acknowledges his daughter's legal right to vote, but believes he should have been consulted first by the CAPS PLUS staff.
"My daughter has a lot of rights," he said. "I know best. Not them."
State Laws on Voting by the Mentally Disabled
The Associated Press reports all but 11 states have limits on voting rights for individuals based on competence.
The states that place no disability-related restrictions on the right to vote are: Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont.
Twenty states bar voting only if a court has determined that an individual specifically lacks the capacity to vote: Alaska Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia bar voting by individuals who are under guardianship or who have been adjudged mentally incompetent or mentally incapacitated: Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Nine states have laws that use outdated and stigmatizing terms such as "idiots" and "insane persons" to describe who is barred from voting based on competence concerns, but those laws are rarely enforced because they are impossible to apply: Arkansas, Iowa Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio, Minnesota, New Jersey and Nevada.
News10/KXTV
