There is perhaps nothing more crippling than watching someone you love fade into the oblivion of dementia. It’s slow and painful like death by a thousand cuts, each one a memory lost. Having gone through the hopelessness and helplessness of watching several family members gradually disappearing into the fog and never coming out of it, I have had a lot whole of unexpected and wholly unwanted contact with this degenerative condition.

I have seen what I can only describe as the emptying of everything that makes the person themselves. I have seen the shifts in personality as minds are forced to leave behind everything that once mattered. And, in the midst of all that internal chaos, all the forgetting of once-beloved children and grandchildren, it would seem that something that doesn’t get lost in Malta is your ability to vote.

Last Sunday, the country woke up to reports that a number of prison inmates barred from voting since their prison sentence was longer than 12 months were taken in for early voting, which was shocking and shady enough. But what I have read over the past 24 hours has disgusted me to the very core. With the powers that be having allegedly taken the quote “every vote counts” to the next level, people have come forward to state that their dementia-suffering relatives were carted off to vote from St Vincent de Paul, despite the fact that they could no longer recognise their own children.

The son of one particular woman said his mother no longer could tell the difference between “Kinnie and tea” and that the family was never officially informed that she would be taken to vote. He also claimed that staff at the home told the family that she had not been certified as fit to vote by a psychologist or psychiatrist.

Former Xarabank presenter and producer Peppi Azzopardi later came forward with a similar complaint saying that his mother who also suffers from dementia was also taken out of her ward in the same residential home to vote without the family being notified.

The alleged lengths that people seem to be willing to go to for an extra vote are not only illegal, they are vastly immoral- Anna Marie Galea

It is beyond reprehensible that these things are allowed to happen in a supposedly democratic and civilised country. Is it not hard enough for people to have to lose their loved ones bit by bit every day?

Must the weak and vulnerable be further given the indignity of being forced into situations that they are unable to consent to? What does it say about a country that exploits weakness for personal gain and allows people to play these dirty tricks time and time again? The alleged lengths that people seem to be willing to go to for an extra vote are not only illegal, they are vastly immoral. Human beings are not commodities and you don’t get to take advantage of them because it suits your narrative.

If it’s true that a civilisation is measured by how it treats its weakest members, then, we are clearly somewhere between the stone age and the medieval period. And all this over an election. You’d think if you were going to sell yourself out, you’d do it for a little more than making already rich men richer. Once you’re carting off those living with intellectual degenerative conditions to vote with no shame or compunction, where exactly do you draw the line? I suppose if there was a line to begin with, we wouldn’t be here.