A hard case for the ethics of supported voting: Cognitive and communicative disabilities, and incommunicability

In this article, I explore the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of supported voting – respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. For each ground, I ask whether it justifies surrogate voting for voters unable to either communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments, due to some cognitive or communicative disability. (Henceforth: incommunicability cases.) I argue that respect as opacity does not permit surrogate voting, and equal status does not justify such support – although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with cognitive and communicative disabilities. Finally, I argue that an account of supported voting based on the ethics of political care can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in incommunicability cases, and it can account for the inclusive approach of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to supported decision-making. However, I show that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellow citizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care – but not necessarily surrogate voting.

what is morally required to support voters living with these disabilities in giving effect to their electoral judgments may also be relatively clear. But a large class of adult voters with disabilities may not be able to express their own electoral judgments, or may only be able to express them in ways that seem unfathomable to most of us, including their caretakers.
In this article, my aim is to establish what kind of support in voting may and should be offered to adult voters who, due to some disability, cannot give effect to their electoral judgment without support, nor can they communicate their electoral judgment -nor could they ever communicate it earlier. In such cases -referred to as incommunicability cases -the supporter can only give effect to what they interpret as the voter's preferences, but not to the voter's judgments. 1 In other words, surrogate voting remains the only possible form of voting support. 2 But is it morally permissible or required in such cases? In order to answer this question, I explore and assess the implications of three moral grounds for the justification of voting support: namely, respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. I show that arguments based on respect as opacity cannot readily justify surrogate voting -but rather a requirement to refrain from surrogate votingand neither can equal status-based arguments justify this form of support. I argue, though, that care ethics-based accounts of supported voting may justify a moral permission of surrogate voting -in very specific circumstances. Yet even on care ethics grounds, I argue, the political community's and the caretaker's duty is not necessarily to ensure and engage in surrogate voting respectively, but rather to ensure and engage in some form of adequate political (in addition to personal) care for the persons in need of support. Methodologically, I arguepace Linda Barclay (2018) -that we should not assume that a voter's need for assistance in casting a ballot implies she cannot make electoral judgments. Instead, we should assume her capacity to make such judgments, and the adequate form of support should depend on whether assistance can give effect to them in a particular case.
'Giving effect to a voter's electoral judgment' means taking the necessary actions to turn a voter's electoral judgment into a vote -for example, driving someone with reduced mobility to the polling station. More narrowly understood, it may involve, for example, marking a candidate's name on the supported voter's ballot paper. In this narrower sense -the focus of my inquiry -the relevant actions require that supporting persons act on some interpretation of the voter's electoral judgments regarding candidates or policy options.
The exact shape of support that voters with cognitive disabilities should be provided with is both theoretically underexplored and practically significant. Theoretical attention is divided between the issue of enfranchisement (Barclay, 2018;Beckman, 2009;Christiano, 2008;López-Guerra, 2014;Mráz, 2020) and deliberative inclusion (Afsahi, 2020;Catala, 2020;Clifford, 2012), on the one hand, and universal legal capacity and the supported decision-making paradigm in general, on the other (CRPD, 2014;Arstein-Kerslake, 2017;Arstein-Kerslake & Flynn, 2017;Browning et al., 2014). Although supported voting raises some specific moral questions (as I hope to show), these questions have attracted little attention (though see Nussbaum, 2009). The practical significance of these issues is underlined by recent empirical research which shows that persons with cognitive disabilities are interested in voting for various reasons (Agran et al., 2016); that persons caring for them are often willing to provide support in voting but do not necessarily know how they should assist (Agran et al., 2015); and that 'significant persons' -parents, teachers, caregivers -around such voters have an immense effect on their political participation (Kjellberg & Hemmingsson, 2013).
The structure of my argument is as follows. I start with reconstructing the basic tenets of the supported decision-making paradigm, and describe the cases I am interested in here. Then, I elucidate how an autonomy-related account of respectrespect as opacity -grounds a requirement to refrain from surrogate voting equal enfranchisement. I proceed to show how equal status-based arguments fail to ground a requirement for surrogate voting. Yet I also point out how such arguments could be more readily deployed than their proponents believe to make sense of the value loss incurred by the persistent non-participation of enfranchised citizens who cannot either give effect to or communicate their electoral judgments. Finally, I show how a care ethics-based approach could justify surrogate voting in highly specific circumstances -but also that it is better seen instead as justifying a duty of providing political care more generally.
What is so special about incommunicability cases?
The UNCRPD does not only prohibit disenfranchising adults living with disabilities -including mental disabilities -but also depriving them of legal capacity and imposing guardianship on them. Instead, the UNCRPD requires that persons living with disabilities be provided with adequate support to make and act upon their own decisions. Hence, adults living with mental disabilities should be enfranchised to vote, and should themselves exercise their franchise, with support if needed. The supported decision-making paradigm relies, in my reconstruction, on the following presumption in the context of voting: The Capacity Presumption: adult voters should be presumed to have the mental capacity to make an electoral judgment as to whether they want to vote, and if so, for which candidate, list (in elections) or policy option (in referendums).
Whether an adult has the mental (agential) capacity described in the presumption is a metaphysical question. Yet the Capacity Presumption does not describe or rely on any metaphysical reality concerning the presence of agential features. Neither does it claim that all adult voters have the relevant mental capacity, not does it deny, of course, that several (or even most) people living with mental disabilities do in fact have the relevant mental capacity. The Capacity Presumption is compatible with considerable diversity, in this respect, within the group of persons living with mental disabilities. 3 However, the Capacity Presumption is not a descriptive but a prescriptive claim. It is a moral requirement that we should rely on in decisions about granting legal rights, legal capacity and about what kind of support to provide voters with. Respect to the persons concerned requires that we should proceed as if all adults, including adults with severe cognitive disabilities, had the relevant agential capacity (Glen, 2012;Kohn, 2014;cf. Carter, 2011) -and provide them with adequate support in decision-making, which may include giving effect to their own decisions. In other words, the Capacity Presumption prescribes that even if the persons concerned are not in possession of the relevant capacity, we should counterfactually proceed as if they were. This corresponds to the progressive conception of legal capacity which does not see legal capacity as necessarily tracking mental or agential capacity -either generally or specifically in the context of voting -but prescribes granting legal capacity even if mental or agential capacity is absent (Glen, 2012, pp. 93-95, 168;CRPD, 2014, p. 3, Point 13).
What follows from this presumption with regard to voters unable to communicate their electoral judgments at all? Such voters may either not be able to express their electoral judgments -whether due to cognitive or motoric disabilities or some combination of them -or if they can, they face a failure of uptake: i.e., their electoral judgments are, in their supporter's sincere judgment, indiscernible. I will refer to cases which exhibit one of these two features as 'incommunicability cases '. 4 What should the supporter do in such cases? If supported decision-making should aim to give effect to the judgment of the supported voter, but there is no epistemic access to that judgment, despite reasonable effort, what should support consist in? 5 The CRPD (2014) General Comment on equal recognition before the law, legal capacity and supported decision-making acknowledges the existence of such cases of incommunicability: 'Where, after significant efforts have been made, it is not practicable to determine the will and preferences of an individual, the ''best interpretation of will and preferences'' must replace the ''best interests'' determinations' (p. 5, para. 21). Likewise, Flynn and Arstein-Kerslake (2014) refer to such cases as more extreme versions of 'facilitated decision-making' -taking the supported decision-making paradigm to include 'facilitation'-which should be 'used only as a last resort when others cannot determine the will and preference of the individual after exhausting all efforts' (pp. 129-130; see also Bach & Kerzner, 2010). The prescribed role of the supporter in 'hard cases' which involve incommunicability is as follows: The role of an external decision-maker in this context is simply to arrive at the best interpretation possible of that individual's will and preferences, from all information available about the person, including from trusted individuals in her life. This 'best interpretation' can then form the basis for a decision to be made, in situations in which the individual's true will and preferences remain unknown. (de Bhailís & Flynn, 2017, p. 16) In other words, proponents of the supported decision-making paradigm suggest that the supporter should give effect to what she takes to be the electoral judgment or preferences of the person in need of support even in cases of incommunicability. These cases are seen as different in degree but not in kind from other, theoretically (but not necessarily practically) less challenging cases of support.
Yet defining the supporter's role as interpreting the supported person's 'will and preferences' masks a significant discontinuity between discovering someone's will as opposed to someone's preferences. Discovering someone's preferences is, on the one hand, merely more or less difficult depending on how easy it is to communicate with them. The difference is one of degree, and it is conceptually coherent to talk about discovering someone's preferences without their ability to communicatefrom a third person perspective, as it were. The non-volitional, non-cognitivistic elements of care and attention may play a significant role in the supporting person's success in this exercise (see Kittay, 2019, p. 175). For example, a caretaker may infer from the supported person's behavior over several years that the latter prefers spending time outdoors, that she has preference for kind and soft-spoken figures of authority -teachers, doctors, bureaucrats -or loud and confident ones; or that she prefers male politicians seen on TV to female politicians.
Discovering someone's will or judgment, on the other hand, is impossible without them communicating it. This follows from what it means to exercise one's will or (synonymously) to make a practical judgment. To make such a judgment is to make a decision about acting on some preferences rather than others, or about not acting on some preferences at all. A practical judgment is more than, and distinct from, a mere vector sum of a person's preferences. For example, a voter may love well-kept outdoor places such as parks, and may even prefer them to indoor places such as a community center. But she may nonetheless make the judgment not to act on this preference because she would rather vote for a policy position or a candidate supporting the community center, given how it contributes to the education of the worse off. Judgments are outputs of one's practical agency; preferences are mere inputs into that process.
In order to have access to someone's judgment, especially ex ante access prior to the action that the judgment relates to, we need access to the first-person perspective. It is the agent who can tell which preferences bear on her electoral judgments, which ones she disregards, and how she weighs them if they conflict. Access to this first-person perspective is not possible, however, without the person ever communicating her judgment. 6 In incommunicability cases, where such access is lacking, the question is whether to fall back on surrogate decision-making, or accept instead that the affected person's franchise will not be and should not be exercised by anyone.
In the remainder of this article, I reconstruct and criticize two arguments for the Capacity Presumption that conclude to a duty to refrain from surrogate support in such cases, and aim to offer a third one which -albeit conditionally -justifies such support in cases of incommunicability. My concern here is exclusively with a pro tanto case for surrogate decision-making grounded in respect for the voter. I will not cover potential countervailing considerations -e.g. the integrity of the electoral process -that may be important for an 'all things considered judgment' as to whether some specific form of supported voting is morally permissible or required in cases of incommunicability. I am solely interested in the preliminary question whether, other things being equal, respect in incommunicability cases requires providing surrogate support, or refraining from it, in the context of voting.
The following sections rely on three methodological assumptions. First, the adequate form of electoral support should be grounded in an account of respect for the voter. Second, an account of what respecting a person living with mental disabilities as a voter requires should fulfill a highly complex normative role. Namely, it should justify the Capacity Presumption and specify what follows from it with regard to enfranchisement, legal capacity -and also what form of support should (not) be provided in incommunicability cases. Thus, universal and equal enfranchisement and legal capacity, and the ethical norms of support in democratic participation, should all be justified by a single account of respect. Third, for an account of respect to fulfill this complex normative role, it must be foundational and normatively rich rather than minimalistic and normatively ecumenical. 7 These methodological assumptions explain both why my inquiry focuses on the following three accounts of respect -opacity respect, respect as equal status, and respect as political care -and how I use these accounts to explore the normative dimensions of supported voting.

Respect as opacity
One way to flesh out the normative content of 'respect' that justifies the Capacity Presumption, grounds universal enfranchisement and legal capacity, and provides action guidance for supporters in incommunicability cases, is to reflect again on the conceptual distinction between judgments and preferences. We cannot, coherently with our reason for holding the Capacity Presumption, assume that it is possible to 'read' a person's electoral judgments 'off' her past or present behavior. In other words, we cannot claim to give effect to a person's electoral judgments, in incommunicability cases. We do not deny that the persons concerned could have made such judgments. Quite on the contrary: we treat them as persons whose judgments are underdetermined by their preferences. Yet, while there is a conceptual distinction between judgments and preferences, the more interesting question is not conceptual, but normative: Why is this distinction relevant for what kind of support should be provided to voters in incommunicability cases? If it is impossible to give effect to a voter's judgments, but it is possible to give effect to her preferences, why not do so instead?
The distinction gains normative significance in light of Ian Carter's (2011) view that respectful treatment of others requires that we not treat them as transparent but as 'opaque', in a relevant sense (henceforth: respect as opacity, opacity respect). 8 Yet giving effect to someone else's preferences, rather than their judgments, is a form of treating them as transparent, rather than opaque. Hence, on the opacity respect account, giving effect to someone else's preferences is disrespectful of them -as long as we presume, holding the Capacity Presumption, that they have relevant judgments too, and not merely preferences. The implication for the limits of supported voting in incommunicability cases is clear: we should not give effect to voters' preferences when we cannot give effect to their electoral judgments. If a voter's right to vote were exercised by someone else based on the voter's own preferences, or based on what is believed to be objectively in the voter's best interest, this would be disrespectful of the voter -and therefore pro tanto prohibited.
The justification on the Opacity Respect Account for refraining from surrogate voting, even if that is the only available form of support, is rooted in respect for the persons in need of support. Crucially to respectful treatment, voters in incommunicability cases are still presumed to have the capacity to form electoral judgments. Yet no help can be provided to give effect to those judgments. As long as supporting institutions and persons proceed on the Capacity Presumption, the relevant question is whether society as a whole, and the supporting person assigned with this role in particular, have made all reasonable effort to discover what the electoral judgments of the person in need of support are. If so, failure is not morally objectionable -even if no less regrettable.
A comparison between the franchise and private autonomy rights sheds light on why giving effect to the electoral preferences of an adult whose electoral judgments are unknown would not alleviate the value loss resulting from the impossibility of giving effect to her electoral judgments. Some private autonomy rights confer a decision-making power on the right-holder that, if not exercised by someone else, can be foreseen to impose extreme burdens on the right-holder in certain circumstances -while exercising them on the right-holder's behalf can save her from some of these burdens. This may provide an overwhelming reason in favor of exercising that right on the right-holder's behalf, even if there is no reasonable way to learn about her relevant judgments (cf. Gooding, 2013). Respecting a person may require, in such circumstances, that the person's rights are exercised according to the best available standard -e.g. based on her preferences, if her judgments cannot be discovered. For example, if someone's right to consent to or decline certain kinds of medical treatment is not exercised by anyone, this may lead to irreversible health consequences or death. Not exercising this right on the rightholder's behalf may be outright cruel, in some circumstances. This drives our intuitions, I believe, in choosing the adequate form of support in the exercise of private autonomy rights -which may thus include surrogate decision-making.
No doubt, just as leaving a private autonomy right unexercised results in value loss, leaving someone's political agency unexercised through voting also results in value loss. What is common to the two cases is the value loss directly constituted by the fact that someone's agency is unexercised. The patient who could not give effect to her own judgment concerning whether she chooses life sustaining treatment suffers an important loss due to the sheer fact that her agency is ineffective -even if her caretaker (in a surrogate role) makes the very choice on her behalf that she would have made or actually did make. Likewise, that the franchise of a person with disabilities goes unexercised results in significant value loss. (More on the nature of this loss will follow in the next section.) The Opacity Respect Account can acknowledge this value loss, but it does not see the potential in surrogate voting to compensate for any of the value loss that occurs in such cases (cf. Wasserman & McMahan, 2012). This is because the concern for this loss follows from the very fact that someone who is presumed to have political agency cannot exercise it; i.e., that they cannot have their judgments -results of their agency -realized in any way. We cannot enact someone's political agency at all if we stand in their place to make decisions on their behalf as their surrogates, just as much as we cannot enact someone's self-determination either by surrogate decision-making -proponents of the Opacity Account could point out. Exercising someone else's rights -whether private autonomy rights or the franchise -based on anything other than their judgment, is always pro tanto disrespectful of them. But in the case of private autonomy rights, this may be outweighed, in special circumstances, by the instrumental benefit -prevention of harm -that the surrogate exercise of the right-holders' rights brings to them. No similar instrumental benefit can be incurred by surrogate voting. Hence, without this weighty countervailing consideration, the pro tanto prohibition on surrogate voting prevails.
The Opacity Respect Account cannot justify the UNCRPD's requirement which prescribes support in whatever form it is available, given the voter's situation, to facilitate the voter's participation in political decision-making -including surrogate voting as a last resort. On the contrary: this account requires that we not provide surrogate support in voting, and calls instead for a less extensive understanding of 'support' in supported voting, in order to respect the persons concerned.
However, it is unclear why we should endorse opacity respect as relevant to how we should treat fellow members of the political community. The Opacity Respect Account may be useful to spell out what respect for self-determining, autonomous adults requires in the exercise of their private autonomy rights. Even as an account of private autonomy, though, the Opacity Respect Account conceptualizes individuals as rather isolated and forecloses the adjustment of social support to their individual circumstances (cf. Jacob, 2015, pp. 69-70). This is a highly controversial ideal of respect for human autonomy that I have no room to critique here in detail. Nevertheless, there is no reason to assume that opacity respect should inform our relations to one another as political equals in a democratic political community. The Opacity Respect Account does not cohere with an ideal of political equality for a democratic society that acknowledges the vulnerability and dependences of its members in their political relations with one another.

Respect as equal status
Another account of respect which could justify the Capacity Presumption and provide action guidance for supporters in incommunicability cases is Linda Barclay's (2018) equal dignity theory. This account is grounded in a moral concern with social standing or status. The Capacity Presumption can be readily justified by this concern. But what does an account of equal status require in terms of voting support in incommunicability cases? Can it justify the conclusions of the UNCRPD's broad understanding of supported decision-making in incommunicability cases? Linda Barclay argues it cannot -on the contrary: We should deny people assistance when casting their vote. A person with cognitive impairments, like everyone else, will be legally entitled to vote. They should enjoy proper opportunities to discuss the election with others, to ask questions, and to receive accessible information about the election and how to vote. They should be able to see a copy of the ballot paper or voting device beforehand, and to ask any questions they may have about how to cast a vote. But when it comes to actually casting a vote, all people should be required to do so on their own. (Barclay, 2018, p. 123) Barclay's argument recognizes, on the one hand, the expressive egalitarian value of enfranchisement, understanding it, with Jeremy Waldron, as 'the entitlement of each person, as part of his or her dignity as an (equal) peer of the realm' (2012, p. 36). She writes, in this spirit, 'a law that publicly declares some people not fit to vote is a threat to their equal status, as is its application' (Barclay, 2018, p. 126). Enfranchisement is a crucial aspect of one's social status in a democratic society (Wilson, 2019;cf. Dworkin, 2000;Fowler, 2014), which should provide a very strong pro tanto reason for universal enfranchisement (see also Mráz, 2020 for an argument for universal enfranchisement along those lines). Likewise, a concern with social status could readily justify universal and equal legal capacity in the exercise of the franchise. Restrictions on legal capacity also express that members of the political community are unfit to exercise their own rights, publicly questioning their equal status just as well as if they were also deprived of their rights.
On the other hand, Barclay's Equal Status Account does not justify a requirement of supported voting by a concern with equal social standing within the political community. This is because Barclay's egalitarian concern is ultimately expressive. It is plausible to assume, after all, that not providing surrogate voting for someone who cannot communicate their electoral judgments, after reasonable effort failed to discover what these are, does not express their inferior social status or standing within the political community. 9 The Equal Status Account may seem ill-equipped to account for the kind of value loss manifested in the failure to exercise the franchise. Arguably, this problem is not specific to Barclay's account; it is a general feature of all equal status-based accounts which see public recognition or expression of this status for individuals as the primary or sole moral concern driving enfranchisement and universal, equal legal capacity. As Ludvig Beckman observes, '[a] remarkable feature of the argument that voting rights are valued exclusively as means for public affirmation of equal status, is that the exercise of the vote does not appear important at all. After all, the right to vote confers equal recognition whether or not this right is put to use' (Beckman, 2017, p. 891). 10 However, equal status accounts in general are actually well-equipped to make sense of the value loss involved in non-participation in this context, in two different ways. First, the significance of participation by voters with disabilities can be derived from general concerns with equal status once we take it seriously that equal political status has both expressive and further, material requirements (Mráz, 2020, pp. 267-268). Guaranteeing that institutions of political decision-making do not express the inferior status of any member of the political community satisfies the expressive requirement of political equality. The expressive requirement is not compromised in so far as all reasonable effort has been made to ensure participation. But the material requirement of political equality is a concern with the distribution of power in itself. It prohibits power distributions in which some are ruled without having a right or opportunity to contribute to ruling or without ever actually contributing to ruling, whereas others do have such rights and opportunities while being ruled and at last occasionally use them to contribute to ruling (cf. Mráz, 2020, pp. 267-268). What is concerning, in light of this requirement, is the sheer state of affairs that some fellow members of our political community cannot and never do contribute to ruling, through voting, while they are being ruled by others. In other words, leaving political agency unexercised on behalf of some members of the political community is a concern with the material requirement of political equality on equal status accounts. There is no omission on the political community's part to recognize their status as co-rulers. The problem, instead, is that in fact they are not co-rulers -i.e., that power is unequally distributed.
Given this general concern, equal political status is compromised by persistent non-participation -even if there is nothing objectionable about occasional nonparticipation (at least from the perspective of equal political status). Equal status as a member of the political community is compromised when an individual is persistently in the position of being ruled without participating in ruling. In such cases, one's status as a co-author of laws becomes no more than fiction.
Second, the persistent non-participation of persons living with (cognitive or communicative) disabilities, if they are seen as an identity group, raises a special concern. The persistent non-participation of individuals, in this case, is not randomly distributed within the electorate. Instead, it correlates with an identity group: notwithstanding the obvious diversity of any such group, members of the political community who live with specific disabilities have a shared history of oppression, face some common challenges in social and political life, and have unique perspectives to contribute to a wide range of political questions (cf. Afsahi, 2020;Clifford Simplican, 2018).
Unlike an apparently similar concern with persistent minorities in democratic theory (see, e.g., Christiano, 2008, pp. 226-228), the concern with persistent nonparticipation is not (only) that some persons never have their preferences satisfied, or their electoral judgments endorsed, by the collective decisions of the majority. Persistent non-participants, even if they belong to an identity-group, need not form a persistent minority in this sense. Assume for a moment -unrealistic as it may bethat persistent non-participants' preferences are satisfied, and their electoral judgments are endorsed, by majority decisions. Even with this assumption in place, the concern with persistent non-participation does not vanish, as it could also be unrelated to the content of democratic decision-making: it has more to do with the lack of a group's political agency. 11 Persistently non-participant identity groups at best have their shared preferences satisfied and judgments endorsed through no political agency of their own. In other words, persistently non-participant groups may not always be on the losing side, but they are at best mere beneficiaries of democratic decisions, and never the active co-authors or contributors, let alone introducers or shapers thereof. 12 And this turns the issue of material political equality into one of expressive political equality, again. This is because it is hard not to interpret the fact that members of an identity group are systematically ruled but never contribute to ruling in a political community as an expression of their inferior status as members of the political community (cf. Christiano, 2008, pp. 296-298;Mráz, 2021, pp. 300-301). While Barclay and Beckman offer convincing accounts of the expressive aspect of political equality for members of the political community seen as individuals, they fail to account for this expressive consequence of persistent non-participation for members of identity groups.
Unfortunately, however, it is far from clear that either the general concern based on material political equality or the special concern with expressive political equality as applied to voters with mental or communicative disabilities as an identity group can be alleviated through surrogate voting in incommunicability cases. Surrogate voting may indeed be one possible way to promote the supported person's instrumental interests in voting. But it is not suitable to address a concern with power inequality within the political community rooted in the very fact that some never contribute to ruling, nor have the opportunity to do so. Surrogate voting would keep this power inequality intact: it would still mean surrogates exercise political power on behalf of others. Hence, I agree with the implication of Barclay's account that the equal status-based account of enfranchising voters with severe mental (and communicative) disabilities does not at once justify surrogate voting in incommunicability cases -even though the complex account I offer above of the material and expressive significance of persistent non-participation allows us to appreciate the value loss in such cases on equal status grounds.

Respect as political care
Another, more promising but also more challenging argumentative strategy to justify even surrogate voting in incommunicability cases can be rooted in a politics and ethics of care approach to respecting members of the political community (Held, 2006;Kittay, 2019). Supported decision-making in general has three general features which make it particularly adequate for norms of care ethics to apply to the relationship between supporters and supported voters; as well as to particular acts of support within it. First, supported decision-making is necessarily individualized. Support in giving effect to someone's judgments requires a highly personal knowledge of the supported person's mindset and the communicative habits through which they are expressed; and the form of support required varies greatly among persons (Sensen, 2018;p. 86). 13 Second, support is typically effective when it is provided within a long-standing relationship, whether of a personal or professional nature (Kittay, 2019, pp 173-174). 14 Individualized support is rarely available in one-off interactions between complete strangers. Third, supporting relationships must be based on trust between the supporting person or caretaker and the person in need of support, given the latter person's vulnerability (Kittay, 2019, p. 174).
These general features help to draw the outlines of an ethical framework for giving effect to someone's electoral judgments within the supported decisionmaking paradigm. Supporters should make all reasonable effort to discover what the supported person's electoral judgments are -and to give effect to them. In order to maintain their unique capacity to do so, supporters should strive to be worthy of the supported person's trust, and to accumulate knowledge about the supported person's mindset and communicative habits that is sufficient for justified beliefformation about the supported person's electoral judgments. Third parties should watch for signs of a genuine, trust-based relationship between the supported voter and her supporter. When such a relationship exists, third parties should acknowledge the highly individualized nature of the support and the consequently unique epistemic position of the supporter to discover the supported voter's electoral judgments. 15 But what does the Care Ethics Account have to say about incommunicability cases? Should the caretaker provide any support in voting for persons who can neither give effect to nor communicate their electoral judgments? In order to pave the way for an answer, we must first recognize that from the caretaker's perspective, there is no discontinuity between giving effect to the supported voter's electoral judgments, on the one hand, and to their preferences, on the other (if their judgments are incommunicable). One reason for this continuity is the following. Respect for persons in need of support, on this approach, triggers a duty to provide them with adequate care. The ultimate concern of this approach is what counts as adequate care-giving coherent with this respect. But adequate care is neither conceptually nor normatively limited to giving effect to a person's judgmentsincluding electoral judgments -even if we presume she has such judgments. Conceptually, respectful care does not mean giving effect to someone's judgments only. Normatively, adequate care has a complex set of aims: it is meant to promote the supported person's welfare and agency. Yet the exact form of adequate care depends on the contingent individual circumstances of the supported person. In some cases, promoting her agency (as well as her welfare) is possible through giving effect to her judgments -and hence this is the kind of care that is adequate and should be provided. In other cases -including incommunicability cases -this is not possible: agency cannot be promoted in the same way, and potentially in no way at all. Adequate, respectful care, then, may still involve giving effect to the supported person's preferences. Hence, this approach does not rule out from the very outset the option that support in voting may mean very different kinds of care as provided to voters who can and voters who cannot communicate their electoral judgments. The care ethics of supported voting may well require supporters to give effect to the voter's electoral judgments when they are communicable, and to exercise the voter's franchise on her behalf, based on her preferences, when her electoral judgments are not communicable.
An additional reason for this potential diversity -and, from a normative standpoint, continuity -of support is related to the political dimensions of care. Care, in this context, is doubly political -as opposed to merely personal. First, generally, caretakers often have duties to care for the persons they are entrusted to care for by political means as well (Tronto, 2015, p. 12;cf. Tronto, 2013). A parent may, for example, vote for parties and candidates whose politics she thinks would leave the natural environment of the country in a better shape for the next generation. This is a way of caring for children -through political means -and parents may have a duty to provide some kind of political care just as much as they should see to the well-being of their children through personal care. Analogously, the caretaker of a person living with severe mental disability or unable to communicate may also have a duty to exercise care for this person through political means. And to exercise as a surrogate someone else's right to vote can indeed be a way of caring for them through political means. 16 Second, care in this context is also political in the broader sense that supported voting as a form of care is not merely embedded in a personal or professional relationship of care, but also in the relationship between the political community and the voter in need of support. Support in voting can be regarded as care ultimately owed by the political community to each individual voter -even if care at this macro level can only be provided in practice at the micro level, i.e., within personal or professional care relationships between individuals. Care is political, in this second sense, because it is constitutive of political relationships that are adequate to democratic, political equality. This is a much stronger claim than a mere instrumental link between care and democratic political relations. I do not claim here that ''[t]he practice of care describes the qualities necessary for democratic citizens to live together well in a pluralistic society' (Tronto, 1993, pp. 161-162). This would be an empirical assumption about the instrumental necessity of care to perform well as one another's co-citizens. My claim instead is that the provision of care partly constitutes democratic political relationships: this is part and parcel of how the political community relates to its members and how citizens relate to their fellow citizens as equal members of the political community. As the later Joan C. Tronto puts it, 'it might be best to think about democracy in terms of organizing care'; '''caring with'' imagines the entire polity of citizens engaged in a lifetime of commitment to and benefiting from [the] principles [of care]. ''Caring with'' is our new democratic ideal' (Tronto, 2015, pp. 13, 14). Pace Tronto, I do not see democracy as reducible to 'the allocation of caring responsibilities and assuring that everyone can participate in those allocations of care as completely as possible' (Tronto, 2015, p. 15). However, I do assume that among other requirements, respect for our political equals also requires that we organize adequate care for each member of the political community -including the political means of care.
How should the political community as well as individual caretakers provide care or support, then, to voters who cannot communicate or give effect to their electoral judgments? On the one hand, care often aims at making the most of the means currently, contingently available for the caretaker to discharge their care duties. 17 The surrogate exercise of the right to vote by the caretaker on behalf of a disabled person may well be one potential way of exercising political care for that person. Hence, if a legal system contingently allows this option, we may have a pro tanto reason to allow surrogate voting as a form of voting support. The surrogate exercise of someone else's franchise may be, in some circumstances, an appropriate or (less plausibly) even a sufficient means of discharging the caretaker's duty of political care for them.
Hence, the Care Ethics Account to supported voting may seem well placed to provide a justification for the UNCRPD duty to provide support understood as inclusive of surrogate voting when the supported persons are (and should be) enfranchised, but there is no way to give effect to their own electoral judgments. The care ethics approach to supported voting can thus also account for the continuity between forms of support that the UNCRPD envisages: they are seen as merely different sides of the same coin. Further, by acknowledging the second political dimension of care above, this approach can also justify why some voters may be owed that their caretaker exercises their franchise on their behalf. All citizens are owed whatever political equality requires providing them with. If political care is a requirement of political equality, and hence of respect for fellow members of the political community, then voters in need of support have a claim right to it.
On the other hand, however, the framework of political care ethics does not uniquely identify the surrogate exercise of the franchise as the only adequate -and hence necessary, pro tanto required -way to exercise political care for a voter who cannot give effect to her own electoral judgments. For example, caretakers may exercise political care for another person by exercising their own right to vote, taking that person's preferences and interests into consideration too as they decide on whom to cast the ballot for. (In fact, this is what parents often do.) Additionally, caretakers can, and in some circumstances, should protest, organize, lobby, etc. to support the persons they care for. Given the diversity of means for political care, a duty of political care for a person in need of support does not entail that the surrogate exercise of their franchise is morally required -even pro tanto. The most we can conclude is that the care ethics approach does not (pro tanto) morally prohibit surrogate voting in incommunicability cases, in contexts where that option is legally available. While countervailing moral considerations may well point to an 'all things considered' prohibition of surrogate voting, a careful assessment of such considerations is beyond the scope of my article. Here my interest is limited to what we pro tanto owe to our enfranchised fellow citizens who can neither give effect to nor communicate their electoral judgments.

Conclusion
In this article, I mapped out three different grounds for supported voting: respect as opacity, respect as equal status, and respect as political care. All of these approaches are coherent with (and some even require) universal adult enfranchisement, including the enfranchisement of adults who are unable to communicate their electoral judgments due to some cognitive or communicative disabilities. Yet my inquiry focused on whether surrogate voting should be pro tanto permitted or required as a form of support provided to voters in the latter situation. I have argued that an account of universal enfranchisement, legal capacity and supported voting based on respect as opacity does not require or permit surrogate voting in incommunicability cases, while an account based on equal status does not justify such support either -although the latter account can make sense of the value loss involved in the persistent non-participation of individuals with mental and communicative disabilities. Finally, I have argued that a care ethics-based account of supported voting can accommodate a pro tanto moral permission to provide surrogate voting as a form of support in the hard cases of incommunicability I have focused on. A care ethics-based framework can account for the UNCRPD's inclusive, unitary approach to supported decision-making, and it can be justified in the context of voting support with reference to a care requirement of political equality. However, I have also shown that in incommunicability cases, what the political community and individual caretakers ultimately owe to adult fellowcitizens as equal members of the political community is some adequate form of political care. In highly special circumstances, this might be surrogate voting -but it need not be.
While this article focuses on a highly specific group of voters who cannot vote without assistance, the analysis presented here has broader implications: it challenges a too generalized, uniform normative approach to voting assistance. On the one hand, my analysis implies that a wholesale rejection of support in votingas it is argued for by Barclay (2018) -is misplaced. It is not consistent with respect for the voter, even if she ''has received plentiful assistance before she cast her vote, … to assume that she does not possess capacity if she cannot subsequently proceed to mark this vote on her own' ' (p. 124). In fact, we should proceed the other way round, first presuming capacity, and then assessing whether assistance can give effect to the voter's electoral judgments in the given case. On the other hand, we should also give up the assumption that assistance can deliver the same value to all voters who need support in exercising their franchise -including all voters living with mental disabilities or challenges in communication. We need a more nuanced analysis of voting support which reflects on various aspects of political agency as well as on the variety of values whose realization may be hindered by nonparticipation, and the potential role of voting support in realizing these different values. This article has taken the first step in that direction.

Funding
Open access funding provided by Eötvös Loránd University. Funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program via the REDEM project (https://www.redem-h2020.eu; Grant Agreement No. 870996) is gratefully acknowledged.

Open Access
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About the Author
Attila Mráz is a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po Paris CEVIPOF and teaches political philosophy at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. His current research focuses on issues in the ethics of voting, democratic theory and legal theory. He has published on disenfranchisement and childhood, on the right to vote and cognitive disability, on the justification of electoral quotas, as well as on untruthful electoral speech and freedom of political expression in democracies.

Notes
1. I set aside cases where a prior judgment was communicated. Such cases can routinely arise, for example, in caring for elderly people living with dementia. However, these cases present entirely different moral challenges, as they also raise the possibility of so-called substituted judgment-based (rather than surrogate) decision-making, as well as that of executing the supported person's own prior judgments (if we have sufficient reason to believe that these judgments are still maintained). Substituted judgment may be an option if a voter communicated her (past) electoral judgments earlier -e.g., she voted in a consistent manner or often revealed her electoral judgments before the onset of a progressive neurological disease such as Alzheimer's. Then a supporter may be in a position to reconstruct what the voter's own present electoral judgments would be in the given election. This is markedly different from the supporting person acting on her own judgment based on the preferences of the person who is eligible to vote but who cannot give effect to her own electoral judgments. Further, this is also different from executing the supported person's own judgment. An example of the latter would be voting Tory on behalf of a person who has always been a Tory voter when there is sufficient reason to believe she still maintains a long-standing judgment to that effect. 2. By 'surrogate voting' or 'surrogate decision-making' I mean all forms of decision-making based on the supporting person's own judgment, rather than giving effect to the supported person's judgments. This is a broad understanding which includes two different forms: (i) the supporter makes a judgment based on the supported person's own individual preferences, (ii) the supporter makes a judgment as to what is in the best interest of the supported person based on an objective assessment of what is typically in the best interest of similarly situated persons (see Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2016, p. 242;cf. Nussbaum, 2007;Nussbaum, 2009). The latter is a considerably less individualized form of support. In a narrower understanding, 'surrogate decision-making' may only mean the latter (cf. CRPD 2014, para. 21, 27). Yet for my purposes, the normative challenge arises from the supporter having to make her own judgment. This is not to ignore the vast moral difference between these two forms, nor to question the superiority of the former form. Cf. the previous note above. 3. This is as it should be: mental disability is a very wide category covering diverse and rather different phenomena (e.g., mental illness as well as cognitive disability). Even within the narrower category of cognitive disability, only some forms and degrees involve the lack of mental (agential) capacity. 4. Incommunicability cases are thus a real subset of the diverse phenomena that Clifford (2012) refers to as 'disabled speech' (p. 211): they concern 'individuals who are physically unable to speak' (p. 212), and 'persons who are refused the opportunity to speak because their mode of communication defies reasonable and coherent standards' (pp. 211-212), whenever this refusal occurs after a genuine attempt, including reasonable effort, to understand the voters concerned. (See also the next endnote.) Yet incommunicability cases do not cover all phenomena of 'disabled speech'. Persons living with disabilities face several further challenges in expressing themselves to others who follow and are used to majority modes of communication. Some of these challenges also present important ethical questions for supported voting -but they fall outside the scope of this article. 5. I do not rely on any particular theory of what 'reasonable effort' consists in. I assume, on the one hand, that it is a genuine effort that may require considerable investment of time and energy on the supporter's part. On the other hand, I assume that resources are scarce in any society, including resources that can be dedicated to support democratic participation in a just society. Hence, 'reasonable effort' is a much higher standard than what general practice could meet today (cf. Clifford Simplican, 2018). Yet it cannot be ruled out on this understanding that at least in some cases, even more effort could turn an incommunicability case into a successful uptake case wherein the supporter discerns (develops a justified interpretation of) the supported voter's electoral judgments. 6. Brock and Buchanan (1990) use similar language to emphasize the distinction between choice or act of will v. preferences: 'A deliberate choice is an act of will or commitment. A preference is merely a pro-attitude, a desire to have one thing rather than something else. Sometimes a person deliberately chooses not to do that which he or she prefers, either out of prudence or because the person thinks it would be morally wrong to do so' (p. 116). 7. For instance, Warren's (2017) concept of 'empowered inclusion' (44) is highly relevant to my topic.
Yet it is deliberately put forth as a minimalistic, ecumenical criterion of identifying democracies that could be justified by various foundational accounts, including (in my view) the three accounts of respect examined in this article. Relying instead on foundational accounts helps us specify exactly which forms of empowerment empowered inclusion should involve. 8. Cf. Wilson (2019), in the more specific context of political decision-making: 'political equality requires that decision-making procedures grant authority to citizens' judgments about what to do, rather than granting authority to their interests. A person's judgment about what to do can endorse action that does not advance, and may even set back, her interests' (pp. 99-100). The idea is that a person's authority and her equal standing in the political community is respected by deferring to her judgments, instead of pursuing or helping to pursue what is in her interest. (Wilson writes about interests vs. judgments, while I write about preferences vs. judgments. The distinction between interests and preferences is otherwise significant, of course, but it is irrelevant to the point about opacity that I make above.) 9. If reasonable effort were not made to discover the content of those electoral judgments, we could not draw the same conclusion. 10. See also Jacob (2015), who specifically argues that on equal status-based accounts of the franchise, there is no value loss for the enfranchised individual either if she does not exercise her franchise: 'if all I care about is the public affirmation of my equal status, it fully suffices to have the right to participate. Making use of this right […] becomes unnecessary and not worth the effort' (p. 68). 11. Persistent non-participation is, of course, very likely (or arguably even certain) to result in insufficient (or no) responsiveness to the group-specific preferences and judgments of the members of the identity group concerned. However, my argument about the concern with persistent nonparticipation does not rest on this claim about insufficient responsiveness. 12. Co-authorship or contribution need not necessarily assume that the group in question plays an active agenda-setting role. A more minimalistic conception of political agency is coherent even with a model of democracy heavily reliant on an elite group-driven political agenda (e.g. Schumpeter, 1976). Recently, some literature on the rationality of voting has emphasized that individual voters should be seen as political agents by virtue of the fact that they are properly regarded as members of a causally efficacious group of voters (Goldman, 1999;Tuck, 2008, pp. 40-45;Beerbohm, 2012, pp. 61-64, 67-76;Brennan & Sayre-McCord, 2015). Analogously, I assume that it is necessary for the political agency of identity groups (and voters who see themselves as members of identity groups) to see themselves at least occasionally as members of a causally efficacious group of voterseven if that is neither necessary nor sufficient for political decisions to be responsive to their interests. Persistent non-participation undermines this conceptual requirement of political agency, and a fortiori also material political equality. 13. Surrogate decision-making which relies solely on highly general features of the individual in determining her best interest does not fulfill this requirement; cf. endnote 2. 14. As Clifford Simplican (2018, p. 299) points out, though, the term 'care' is 'generally rejected within the professional workforce surrounding intellectual disability.' I continue using it given its prevalence in the normative ethical literature. 15. Opportunities for care empower caretakers to help supported persons and address their vulnerabilities but at the same time also create a potential for abuse and hence create new vulnerabilities and dependencies. (On complex dependency, see Clifford Simplican, 2015;Kittay, 2020.) For this reason, care must be exercised and regulated in a way that facilitates accountable, genuine trustbased care relationships and attempts to prevent abuse. The exact implications of this requirement vary from domain to domain. Although the empirical and policy research necessary to draw these implications for supported voting is crucially important, it is beyond the scope of this article. 16. An obvious limit of the analogy presented here is that parents can only exercise their own franchise to care for their children. This is not the same as exercising another person's right to vote as a means of caring for them. But that is exactly what is involved in surrogate voting for persons who cannot give effect to their electoral judgments or communicate them. I will return to this problem below. At this point, we are merely considering examples of using a political means to care for someone. 17. It can also aim at challenging the status quo for the benefit of the person cared for -which may include the aim of extending means of care beyond what is currently available.