Examining Voting Capacity in Older Adults with and without Cognitive Decline

Nowadays, controversy exists regarding the stage of cognitive decline and/or dementia where voting capacity is diminished.

To evaluate whether general cognitive status in advancing age predicts voting capacity in its specific aspects.

The study sample comprised 391 people: 88 cognitively healthy older adults (CH), 150 people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and 153 people with Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD). The assessment included CAT-V for the voting capacity and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) for general cognitive ability. ANOVAs and ROC curves were the tools of statistical analysis towards (a) indicating under which MMSE rate participants are incapable of voting and (b) whether the CAT-V total score can discriminate people with dementia (PwADD) from people without dementia (PwtD).

Out of the six CAT-V questions, one question was associated with a low MMSE cutoff score (19.50), having excellent sensitivity (92.5%) and specificity (77.20%), whilst the other five questions presented a higher MMSE cutoff score, with a good sensitivity (78.4% to 87.6%) and specificity (75.3% to 81.7%), indicating that voting difficulties are associated with cognitive status. Secondarily, the total CAT-V score discriminates PwADD from PwtD of 51-65 years (sensitivity 93.2%/specificity 100%-excellent), PwADD from PwtD of 66-75 years (sensitivity 73.3%/specificity 97.1%-good), PwADD from PwtD of 76-85 years (sensitivity 92.2%/specificity 64.7%-good), whilst for 86-95 years, a cutoff of 9.5 resulted in perfect sensitivity and specificity (100%).

According to MMSE, PwADD have no full voting competence, whilst PwtD seem to have intact voting capacity. The calculated cut-off scores indicate that only people who score more than 28 points on the MMSE have voting capacity.