Healing the Vote: Recruiting Pre-Health and Health Professions Students for Voter Mobilization

Abstract

Civic engagement shapes community health. Major health and policy bodies—including Healthy People 2030 and the American Medical Association—recognize civic engagement and voting as social determinants of health. Despite this, health professionals are seldom involved in voter mobilization efforts, and the gap begins early in training. Pre-health undergraduate students are less likely to participate in civic engagement compared to their peers in the social sciences. We offer a model for health care organizations and health care delivery systems to engage, train, and mobilize pre-health and health professions students to support nonpartisan voter registration in community settings, while also promoting greater civic engagement within the community. Furthermore, students who participated in this program often ended up registering to vote themselves. Drawing on the experience of Healing the Vote during the 2023 and 2024 U.S. elections, which recruited hundreds of volunteers and facilitated voter resource outreach to over 5,000 community members, we identify strategies for effective engagement. These included evidence-based presentations, low-barrier messaging, performance-based incentives, and consistent communication. We provide guidance for scaling this approach to strengthen civic engagement as a means of promoting public health and health equity. This initiative, and its success, allowed for students and health professionals to fulfill their dual mission of caring for the health and social well-being of patients, while also supporting the long-term sustainability of their community.