'Surprisingly, the number of Alabama residents deemed "mentally incompetent" and therefore banned from voting is only in the hundreds'
Deemed 'mentally incompetent,' hundreds of Alabamians have lost the right to vote
https://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2018/08/deemed_mentally_incompetent_hu.html
Until 22 years ago, Alabama's constitution declared that "[a]ll idiots and insane persons" in the state "shall be disqualified both from registering, and from voting."
In 1996, the state legislature approved an amendment to the Constitution that repealed the section containing that dated language. The amendment replaced the section with one that states that "mentally incompetent" people should not be allowed to vote until "removal of disability" takes place.
The idea that some people may not be sufficiently mentally competent to handle the responsibility of voting is a straightforward one, but in practice its application is more complicated.
It is vital that voting rights only be taken away from people deemed "mentally incompetent" under the most extreme circumstances, according to advocates including Jenny Ryan, staff attorney at the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program.
"We would fall on the side that a person should have their rights unless there is something egregious to take them away," Ryan said.
As of April, in Alabama there were "755 people who are listed as not eligible [to vote] because of mental incompetence," John Bennett, Secretary of State John Merrill's deputy chief of staff, told AL.com.
"In 2017, there were 33 instances of individuals being declared incompetent to the point of having their voting rights taken away," Bennett said, noting that Merrill's office compiles such data but plays no role in making decisions about individuals' mental competency. Between January 1 and April 12 of this year, six more people were added to that list.
People who have been declared "mentally incompetent" did not earn that designation by failing a standardized test or committing a specific infraction. They were instead each given the designation by a county probate judge.
Probate judges have sole discretion over who is deemed "mentally incompetent," and they are also the only officials who have the ability to lift such a designation. And while probate judges have revoked the voting rights of 755 Alabamians they designated as "mentally incompetent," many other people who have been designated as such have retained their voting rights. Even in extreme cases of "mental incompetence," judges have to specifically rescind voting rights when making such a determination, according to Bennett.
"Involuntary commitments don't involve losing the right to vote," he said. "So you can be involuntarily committed for life and still have the right to vote. A judge would have to stipulate in their ruling that someone is not able to vote."
Some Alabamians have regained the franchise by petitioning the probate judge who revoked their voting rights to reinstate them. Of the 755 people who lost the right to vote due to "mental incompetency," 140 applied to have their rights reinstated and were denied; the other 615 presumably never applied for reinstatement, according to Bennett. Merrill's office does not have a tally of how many people had their rights reinstated, though Bennett and others said that it does sometimes happen.
Interestingly, the numbers vary greatly by county and do not track with population.
Of the 615 people in Alabama as of April who lost their voting rights after they were declared "mentally incompetent" and have never applied for reinstatement, 182 are from Etowah County, which has a population of only about 103,000 people.
That means Etowah - which is not one of the most populous counties in Alabama - accounts for nearly 30 percent of the statewide total. It is unclear why Etowah County is such an outlier.
Another 126 are from the much larger Mobile County (2017 population estimate: 414,000) and 91 are from Morgan County (2017 population estimate: 119,000.)
Meanwhile, only 28 people from the state's most populous county, Jefferson County, (2017 population estimate: 659,000) and just 19 people from Madison County (2017 population estimate: 361,000) had lost the franchise due to "mental incompetency." Sixteen counties had zero such cases, according to the data provided by Merrill's office.
(More at above url)
