Health workers aid voter efforts

Registration push underway as part of nationwide campaign

BOSTON — An emergency room doctor in Boston is assembling thousands of voter registration kits for distribution at hospitals and doctors’ offices.

Later this month, students at Harvard and Yale’s medical schools are planning a contest to see which of the Ivy League rivals can register the most voters.

And a medical student in Rhode Island has launched an effort to get emergency ballots into the hands of patients who find themselves unexpectedly in the hospital around Election Day.

Hospitals, doctors and health care institutions across the country this month are committing to efforts to engage Americans in the election process as part of Civic Health Month, a nationwide campaign that kicked off Aug. 1.

Hospital networks in Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin and elsewhere are among more than 60 institutions participating, along with thousands of individual physicians.

Benjamin Ruxin, a Stanford University graduate student who leads the campaign, said the coronavirus pandemic underscores the importance of ensuring everyone can vote and help shape health care policy for the challenging times ahead.

Voter registration rates are down almost 70% in some states this election cycle because the traditional ways of registering voters have been curtailed by the pandemic, including DMVs and in-person registration drives, he said.

Alister Martin, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said he founded VotER to provide medical professionals with voter registration resources after years of seeing patients struggling from the health consequences of poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and other social ills.

“We’ve been trained to solve these really complex health problems, but not everything we see can be treated with a prescription,” he said. “The health care system does not work for vulnerable people — full stop. We have to help them get involved in the political process if we hope to change any of this.”

The sheer number of organizations and the variety of efforts being proposed during the monthlong campaign shows that the medical community is increasingly shedding its reticence at civic engagement, said Kelly Wong, a medical student at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Where previous generations may have seen the voter registration and other nonpartisan election work as outside their purview or too overtly political, newer medical professionals see civic engagement as a crucial part of “treating the whole patient,” she said.

Wong founded Patient Voting to get doctors and other hospital staff members to commit to helping patients request, cast and submit emergency ballots when the time comes. The nearly 3-year-old organization’s website is also a repository of verified information about every state’s emergency ballot processes.

Another effort, called Med Out the Vote, is focused on getting medical students registered to vote and encouraging them to organize voter registration efforts on campus where possible.

Jonathan Kusner, a Harvard Medical School student who co-chairs the effort, said students at dozens of institutions have expressed interest, with a number looking to host head-to-head voter registration competitions against rival schools.

Medical students at the University of North Carolina recently bested their counterparts at Duke in a threeday contest that resulted in more than 500 total new voter registrations and requests for mail ballots, he said. Harvard and Yale students are planning a similar competition, as are those at Penn State and Ohio State.