Nursing-home resident goes into cardiac arrest while filling out his absentee ballot, revives after CPR, wakes up, asks, “Did I vote?”
True story, apparently, from Southfield Township, Michigan: Nursing-home resident goes into cardiac arrest while filling out his absentee ballot, revives after CPR, wakes up, asks, “Did I vote?”
Footnote It would be ironic if the Lazarus in the story had just finished voting for a candidate pledged to slashing the Medicaid budget that pays for nursing-home care, but it wouldn’t make his citizenship any less heroic.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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I think it would. Voting against your self-interest might be heroic. Voting for a liar rarely is. Voting for this liar-not at all.
From the story, I don’t think the elderly man was a nursing-home resident; he was voting at Township offices and the man voting next to him happened to be a home-care nurse.