Despite being supported by voters twice in the last decade, Maine’s constitutional ban on voting rights for the mentally ill under guardianship was properly tossed out last week by U.S. District Judge George Singal. His summary judgment made it clear that even the state’s retreat on a redefinition of what the ban actually meant could not save this bit of archaic law from history’s trash heap.

Specifically, Judge Singal found that the section in the Maine constitution that prohibits from voting people under guardianship for reasons of mental illness violated the U.S. Constitution’s due-process clause and equal-protection clause under the 14th Amendment. This is so, he says, because “the state has disenfranchised a subset of mentally ill citizens based on a stereotype rather than any actual relevant incapacity.” Though the number of people affected by the ban is small, perhaps 500 to 1,000, the ruling was important because it did away with the last of the patently offensive exclusions to Maine’s ballot. The Maine Constitution, as adopted in 1821, withheld the right to vote from a lot of people – women, paupers, Indians and the insane. Through the years, these had been dropped, until by 1965 there was but one, and as of last week the guardianship exclusion was gone, too.

The state seemed particularly aware that this ban was unsupportable and barely tried to defend the system in which probate judges, who decide whether to put a person under guardianship for mental illness, tend to disagree sharply over what authority they have to reserve that person’s right to vote. Further, because Maine disenfranchises the mentally ill under guardianship but not others who are mentally incapacitated, its claim of a compelling interest to ensure that all who cast ballots understand the effect of voting doesn’t hold up.

The physician of one of the three women who brought the case to District Court testified that not only was his patient able to distinguish among various issues on a ballot, but he found that a person under guardianship for a severe mental illness “is more likely to be monitored and receive treatment which will help restore him or her to capacity in areas such as voting,” compared with a similar person without guardianship. And disagreement over just what is a mental illness, as opposed to one with a physiological basis, makes the Maine law look capricious at best.

Faced with long-term inconsistencies and real unfairness, the state tried mightily as the case evolved to rewrite the meaning of this section of the constitution, unsuccessfully battling 36 years of its application. First, the defendants tried to broaden the definition of mental illness to address the question of mental capacity, then they announced a new probate procedure and finally reinterpreted Maine’s constitution to conclude that the affected people actually retain the right to vote unless it is expressly denied. None of this was real; it wasn’t put into practice anywhere. It was the state’s attempt to save a case it could not win and may not have wanted to win. Judge Singal reviewed these substantial revisions and noted dryly, “It is not clear the either the Maine courts or the Maine Legislature would endorse State Defendants’ unique interpretation of Maine law.”

An intriguing aspect to this suit is that voters, armed through two vigorous information campaigns by advocates, knew or could easily have known about the conditions that led Judge Singal to consider the law unconstitutional. It was known, for instance, that guardianship did not equate with incapacity, that the court system was not adequately addressing the issue and that a minority of Maine people were being denied a fundamental expression of democracy, and yet twice voters strongly supported these prejudices.

Some might suggest that most voters couldn’t or didn’t bother to understand these issues before voting on the question, but that would suggest that they did not see a lack of understanding as a fair impediment to voting, at least for themselves.

Maine had been one of only two states left in the nation with this outdated view of mental illness still on its books. Maryland now has the distinction of the final one. The mentally ill and their advocates have been pointing out the basic unfairness of the law for a decade. It is gratifying to see their arguments so thoroughly confirmed.