The growing role of health care settings in voter registration

October 2, 2024October 2, 2024 Journalist's Resource, Special to lassennews.com

The Journalist’s Resource looked at what research says about two timely topics:

Here’s information from the Journalist’s Resource investigation.

Health care settings in voter registration
The Department of Motor Vehicles is the most common place Americans register to vote, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Less common, but more common than it used to be, is registering to vote at hospitals and other health care settings.

In a new research roundup, Naseem Miller explores the impact of Vot-ER (pronounced Vote-E-R), a nonpartisan nonprofit project in which doctors and other health care provides encourage and help patients to get registered.

A June 2024 study, published in JAMA Health Forum, compares the demographics and voting behavior of individuals reached through Vot-ER with those engaged through traditional political campaign outreach in 2020.

“The study finds that health care-based voter mobilization successfully reached a more diverse population compared with traditional methods,” Miller writes. “Of the 12,441 patients engaged in health care settings, 41.9 percent were aged 18 to 29, and 39.6 percent identified as racial or ethnic minorities. These proportions were significantly higher than in national surveys, which reported younger voters and racial minorities making up smaller shares of contacts.”

Vot-ER has caught the attention of The Republican National Committee, Miller adds.

In early September, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Luke Bunting, an attorney for the RNC’s Election Integrity program, had sent a letter to secretaries of state or election officials in six swing states; the letter alleged that Vot-ER is “weaponizing the healthcare system … across the nation for partisan political purposes.”

You can read a version of the letter here.

Vot-ER leaders maintain that they don’t endorse any party or candidate, and their aim is simply to provide patients with the tools to register. The American Medical Association passed a resolution two years ago acknowledging that “voting is a social determinant of health.”

Do child access prevention laws prevent gun violence?
In two recent high-profile cases, the parents of suspected school shooters have been criminally charged, in part based on allegations that they knew their teenage children were a potential danger to others but allowed them access to guns.

It’s important that journalists covering gun safety know the details of child access prevention and safe storage laws in their state, including the types of firearms covered, whether the law specifies the type of storage devices required and potential penalties, and the impact these laws have.

To help guide journalistic coverage of this topic, Clark Merrefield looks at what research says about whether child access prevention laws are effective in preventing school shootings, homicides and self-harm with guns.

Among the findings he highlights

Nearly 3 in 4 Americans support safe storage policies, including 57 percent of gun owners in one nationally representative survey.
Associations between child access prevention laws and school shootings are unclear, though there is scant research on the topic. One paper did find that high school students were less likely to carry a gun anywhere after their state enacted a safe storage law.
There is stronger evidence that child access prevention laws are associated with lower rates of self-harm among children, as well as lower rates of homicides committed by children.
Child access prevention laws are not a cure-all. They are one policymaking tool among many that, combined, can reduce firearm-related deaths.