NY Times Features Near-Death (And One Dead) Voter Trying to Sway 2020 Election: ‘I’m Not Afraid to Play the Death Card’

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Voters near death are seeking to make a difference in the 2020 election, according to The New York Times, which featured several of them on Wednesday, in addition to at least one who has already departed.

“I’m not afraid to play the death card. If that’s going to impress somebody into voting, that would be great,” 77-year-old Judy Welles of Portland, Oregon told the paper in an interview last month.

The Times noted that Welles — who suffered from a rare cancer originating in her appendix — expected to receive an absentee ballot on October 14, but on September 28, opted to receive assisted suicide under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, reasoning that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was likely to win her state without her vote. Instead, Welles spent her final hours sending 15 letters through a campaign called Vote Forward, urging people to vote in Pennsylvania.

Other voters expressed having similar energy for the election.

“A lot of us have worked really hard to make this country great,” 94-year-old Ohio resident Ray Blankenship told the paper, adding that he was voting for President Donald Trump “just to keep the country running right now.”

Jill Haak Adels, an 82-year-old Maine resident suffering from cancer and a progressive lung condition, said she was doing the same. “The president we have now is just fine,” Adels said. “He’s done a lot of things that have been overdue for a long time.”

Harriet Feferman, a 100-year-old Florida resident who said she cast her first vote for Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, presumably in 1940, said she planned to vote Democrat again this year, calling Trump a “bad president.”

“It’s about who you are,” said Dr. Kent Neff, an 81-year-old retired psychiatrist in Oregon who didn’t specify how he planned to vote. “The fact that I wouldn’t be around has no bearing on whether I would vote. If I were going to die in the next week, voting would still be high on my list.”