New Jersey Court Rules that Persons Hospitalized for Mental Illness Presumed Competent to Vote

By Kay Schriner (kays@comp.uark.edu)
 

The New Jersey state appellate court has ruled that individuals who are hospitalized for psychiatric treatment must be "presumed competent" to vote and cannot automatically be prevented from voting, according to an Associated Press article by John P. McAlpin.

The ruling settles a dispute which arose when the Mercer County Republican Committee contested absentee ballots cast in the 1998 election by patients at the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. The state appellate court ruled that the ballots must be counted because these patients had not been found by a court to be mentally incompetent.

New Jersey state constitution states that "No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage" (N.J. Cons. Art. 2, sec. 6), but there is no statutory definition of these terms.

The court's holding emphasized that "...the right to vote is quintessential to our democratic process." According to Paul Prior, a staff attorney for the New Jersey Protection and Advocacy program, who is quoted in the AP article, the question of voting by people labeled mentally ill "goes to the heart of society's misconception of people with mental illness or in psychiatric hospitals." Prior says that "People with mental illness should not be treated differently than anyone else."