Doctors at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (PPI) use Vot-ER, a nonprofit founded in 2019 by a former White House fellow, to register their patients to vote. Many of these patients suffer from schizophrenia, substance abuse, depression, or bipolar disorder. While the hospital’s inpatient clinic expresses that most of these patients can’t complete “activities of daily living” or are “suicidal, aggressive, or dangerous to themselves or others”, the institute says that registering them to vote “helps empower patients and makes them feel good.”
In its first election cycle in 2020, Vot-ER partnered with more than thirty-five health professionals in Pennsylvania and registered almost 10,000. Its Pennsylvania-based partnerships include the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, Penn Medicine, the Pennsylvania State Nurses Association, the Pennsylvania Association of Community Health Centers, and the Keystone Progress Education Fund. The current Vot-ER Pennsylvania Organizing Manager, Brett Scruton, has publicly supported the Coffee Tree Union in Pittsburgh. He also publicly criticized former PA Senator Toomey’s vote on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and he has publicly supported abortion.
Meet Brett, our new Pennsylvania Organizing Manager! With a rich background in voter rights, Brett is all set to ignite change across the Keystone State. Not just a political whiz, he's a die-hard Pittsburgh sport fan who loves exploring local hangouts! #PA #Pittsburgh pic.twitter.com/6g5azaqlBE
— Vot-ER (@Vot_ER_org) April 3, 2024
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Vot-ER is also registering voters in cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, substance abuse clinics, and palliative care departments across the state. Even in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), parents are being asked about their voter registration by the very doctors who are caring for their sick newborns. Kristen Walsh, a pediatrician in New Jersey, told the Washington Free Beacon, “As a parent in that situation, you’re on edge a lot of the time. There are a lot of medical decisions to be made, and you are hanging on the doctor’s every word.”
Here’s how the program works: doctors and nurses have a badge they wear around their necks with a QR code. They’ll ask the patient(s) if they’re registered to vote, and if they say no, they’ll encourage them to scan the QR code, which will bring them to an online voter registration platform. According to Vot-ER’s data, sixty-four percent of the clinics that use these badges “predominantly serve” African Americans and Hispanics, who lean eighty-three and sixty-one percent Democrat, respectively. Twenty-nine percent of the clinics serve patients primarily under the age of twenty-four, an age group Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
Yale Medical School’s psychiatry lecturer Sally Satel commented on the actions of hospitals and healthcare institutes that actively use Vot-ER, saying, “I can’t even begin to tell you how inappropriate this is. It’s such a contamination of a physician’s role.” Satel also pointed out, “If you’re a patient, you want your doctor to like you. In a real sense, your doctor has the power.” New Jersey Pediatrician Kristen Walsh similarly said, “It’s very easy to insert politically coded speech into these interactions. You are effectively signaling to the patient how you want them to vote. And then you’ve really muddled the patient/doctor relationship.”
It’s not uncommon for physicians to wear pins or lanyards that easily give away their political affiliations or opinions along with their Vot-ER badge. One example of this is when physicians at the University of California, San Francisco, wore pro-Palestinian pins on their white coats.
Although Vot-ER claims to be non-partisan, it is staffed by progressive operatives and funded by progressive foundations. Its founder Dr. Alister Martin is currently the CEO of “A Healthier Democracy”, a platform for “collaboration and community organizing at the intersection of health and civic engagement that leverages the untapped power of healthcare workers and healthcare settings as the people and places where social change can emerge”. Dr. Martin, who’s affiliated with the Massachusetts General Hospital for Social Justice and Health Equity, once said in an interview with the Boston Globe that he told a recovering patient from an asthma attack that voting is the “only way to take the smog out of the air”.
During his fellowship with the White House, Dr. Martin is described as working “directly with Vice President Kamala Harris”, and he advised her on voting rights, specifically Vot-ER. He also helped run the White House’s health equity portfolio, which included managing outreach to the healthcare provider community to keep them updated on the latest vital public health happenings.
Attorney Stewart Whitson with the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) pointed out that “Under the IRS Code, all 501(c)(3) organizations are strictly forbidden from engaging in voter registration or get-out-the-vote efforts in a partisan manner”, and that Biden’s executive order, “sets the conditions for groups like Vot-ER to do just that, a clear violation of federal law.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Vot-ER is run by an umbrella non-profit, A Healthier Democracy, which has referred to DEI as “the bedrock of fair healthcare.” WFB also said in their report, “And ahead of the 2024 election, it is leading a movement—backed by top medical groups and an executive order from the Biden-Harris administration—that is turning healthcare centers into political battlegrounds.” Other critics point out that Vot-ER hosts trainings on “medical racism” and partners with the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, which is turning doctors into political activists and patients into political capital.
According to a Freedom of Information Act request, documents show that Vot-ER is seemingly linked to President Biden’s 2021 executive order that gave unprecedented new tools to federal agencies to register voters with the help of “approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and state officials”. As part of this order, government agencies nationwide have been promoting “get-out-the-vote” campaigns at taxpayers’ expense.
According to the organization, Vot-ER has over 350 institutional partnerships, 700 participating sites, and 50,000 doctors helping to register patients. The PPI noted in its 2022 report about its voter registration efforts. David Ditch with the Heritage Foundation recently pointed out how these actions by hospitals like PPI align perfectly with the Biden/Harris administration’s attempts to promote a radical agenda with help from left-leaning non-profits.
What makes this thread disturbingly credible to me is how much the details line up PERFECTLY with the Biden-Harris administration's standard procedures. They work with scores of leftist nonprofits to promote a deeply radical agenda.
Link to my report in the reply. https://t.co/Yba88RK8fM pic.twitter.com/oVCD0Svr0D
— David Ditch (@DavidADitch) August 6, 2024
