A follow-up to this post: Over the AP wire today comes the story of two Iowa women who challenged the ballots of relatives who they believed to be incapable of voting.

Brenda Lyddon said she was upset when staff at a group home in Grinnell took her 26-year-old son, who is developmentally disabled, to vote on Election Day against her wishes…. “I am his mother and he was not allowed to vote,” Lyddon said. “He does not have the mental capacity to choose for himself.” …

[Similarly,] in Council Bluffs, a woman challenged her elderly mother’s absentee ballot, claiming her mother suffered from dementia and was coerced into casting the ballot by Democratic campaign workers who were going door-to-door asking potential voters if they wanted an absentee ballot.

In both cases the challengers supported John McCain, while their relatives voted for Obama. And this is the rub: Who can really say whether such challenges hold merits on their own grounds or whether they are base attempts to support preferred candidates by disenfranchising the electorate of their opponents? No official attempting to ensure elections are fair would dare to make the judgment of who is competent and who is not. Fortunately, in both of these cases, no official did.

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