I feel a bit uncomfortable about the idea of my mother voting today. The plan is to do what we have done the last few times - I will walk my parents to the polling station and my father (68) will go into the booth with my mother (70) and 'help' her to vote.
The problem is that she has absolutely no idea what's going on now at this stage and we can only guess at who she would vote for. I have an email from her from 2016 in which we discussed who we would vote for but there is no way to know whether she would still want to vote for the same person given that after 8 years in power now they are considerably less popular than when they were in 2016! My father has decided to vote in a different direction (and I am also tempted by the same option) and is going to vote the same way for my mum. But I feel a bit uncomfortable that he is basically just getting two votes and we have no way to hear my mum's voice and vote the way she might really have wanted.
The various websites are all pretty unhelpful. I often feel most websites and discussions about dementia are all about the earlier or middle stages so this specific thing isn't covered. All it says is this: "Everyone with dementia has a right to vote. The Mental Capacity Act provides a framework for making decisions on behalf of people who lack capacity to make a decision but this does not apply to voting. It is up to the individual to decide if they want to vote."
Mum doesn't know what voting is anymore. She can't answer basic questions like whether she is hungry, thirsty, in pain, warm enough, too hot. There is no way of knowing what she wants except to go with the fact that we nearly always agreed on things like this and my parents political opinions were always pretty aligned.
I may be overthinking this in our case but I was interested in what other people thought about the issue in general. I worry about other abuses like someone being encouraged to vote far-right when they never would have before dementia (thankfully not at all the case here, its all about left or slightly less left in our case). Interested to here other opinions or cases.