Your Advocacy Includes Making Sure You’re Registered and Ready to Vote

As we hurtle toward Election Day, this is the season when fundraisers and pols labor to “activate” voter bases and blocs to favor one or another candidate.

With no candidate in mind but so much at stake, I’m writing to activate a whole movement: you, a health care expert who treats scores of patients whose stories and challenges you are uniquely able to amplify.

I want to remind you that this power flows first through your ballot — and tell you that the Academy has a new voter registration toolkit to help you exercise that power, starting with making sure your voter registration is current.

We’re publishing these tools in partnership with the nonpartisan civic health nonprofit Vot-ER, which, alongside numerous other medical and health care organizations, is emphasizing Sept. 17 as National Voter Registration Day. Yes, the election is still more than two months away, but in some states the window for voter registration will close soon.

The AAFP is and has always been nonpartisan. We don’t endorse presidential candidates or political parties. But we’re fully behind the act of voting, which is a social determinant of health. Maximizing voter participation by family physicians has the potential to improve policies that affect health care access, costs, quality and outcomes. That’s why the Academy advocates for legislation to make voting more accessible. (Our Vot-ER partnership also includes materials to help family physicians interested in talking about voter registration with their patients.)

Registering to vote, as well as informing yourself on your candidates and your ballot’s special questions, is frontline community advocacy. It’s also civic engagement that strongly complements your role as a community health leader. AAFP member Alex McDonald, M.D., CAQSM, FAAFP, made this case recently in an essay in Physician’s Weekly. He has a unique perspective on the subject because he successfully ran for local office himself, something he and I talked about on the Fighting for Family Medicine podcast this past winter. His July op-ed notes that health care professionals are 12% to 23% less likely to vote than the general population and is candid about some of the reasons for this surprising lag.

One reason McDonald names is politics. The discourse is loud and wearying. Issues that bear heavily on social determinants of health as well as on physicians and their practices — housing, education, the environment — feel monolithic even before discussion of them is colored by rhetoric or tainted with disinformation. But at the local level, these issues tangibly affect family medicine patients, especially vulnerable populations. Your grasp of the challenges and complexities of delivering health care to your patients is what lets you cut through the noise. Your attention to local and state elections can expand protections and care opportunities for your patients.

Politics is only the conversation. Governance is the action. Governance, not politics, is the point of Election Day.

Then there are the more logistical barriers many of you face. For one thing, you’re a physician, which means you’re profoundly busy. You might be at work when the polls open and when they close. Maybe you’ve moved since the last presidential election.

In fact, let’s say you’ve aimed yourself at a health professional shortage area. Let’s say you’re living in a small community in a state where the Electoral College votes are a foregone conclusion no matter your preference at the top of the ballot — an oft-cited excuse for sitting out an election.

But let’s say there’s a heated race for the county commission on the same ballot. What local health policy or funding will this contest decide? You know what your practice and your patients need from that county commission. Can you afford not to protect your investment in your community’s health by casting your vote?

Wherever you are, your work and your community’s health and health equity are on the ballot. I urge you to take advantage of the Academy’s resources to make sure you are ready to vote in this and every election.