Voting in Nursing Homes
Tonight I was going over my journal from a few years ago. It brought to mind the disastrous day when it took three hours for only eight nursing home residents to vote.
The odd part was that we had a voting precinct available in our building. General public could vote, but we were registered at a elementary school across the street.
Learning of this problem, the nursing home looked into voting electronically, where a hand held device could be brought to each resident. After trying this machine out with one resident, we found out the device was defective. The only other option we had was to get the facility van and gather together all the residents.
Despite this inconvenience and waiting over two hours, some of the residents were still willing to wait so they could vote. However, as time continued to pass, more and more residents became tired and fatigued. In the end, we waited three hours and only eight of the seventeen residents who wanted to vote were able to sustain the process.
I also have a close friend who lives in a nursing home. She discussed on several occasions that she would like to vote, but did not know how to go about it. I assumed the nursing home would help with this process. After the election, I happened to ask her if she had voted. To my surprise the facility did nothing to assist her.
According to an article in USA Today, approximately 10% of the population live in nursing homes. So imagine if every facility had a similar issue. This would lead to a large percentage of people who did not get to exercise their right as Americans.
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