New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) tapped as his health czar the founder of a left-wing nonprofit that registered patients in mental hospitals to vote.
Mamdani selected Alister Martin on Jan. 31 to lead the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Martin, a former emergency room doctor, launched Vot-ER in 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The group creates materials for doctors to register their patients to vote in clinical settings. One of its earlier partners, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, is an inpatient clinic for people with psychotic disorders.
Citing the “therapeutic” benefits of voting, the institute has used Vot-ER’s tools since at least 2021 to register patients hospitalized for schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, and life-threatening addictions. Some of those patients had been involuntarily committed, raising thorny questions about informed consent and the use of vulnerable people as political pawns.
“Oftentimes these patients do not have the capacity to make a decision early on in an acute hospitalization,” Jane Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and medical ethicist at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, told the Washington Free Beacon in 2024. “What are we doing ethically posing this kind of question to people who are so vulnerable?”
Such questions did not deter Martin, a former Kamala Harris staffer, from helping more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote. Vot-ER’s tools have been used in cancer hospitals, emergency rooms, hospices, and even the neonatal intensive care unit, where some providers now ask the parents of gravely ill infants about their voter registration status.
Critics say the practice is ripe for exploitation and has eroded trust in medicine. Now, as Martin takes the reins of one of the largest public health agencies in the county, invasive questions about voting could become standard practice at many clinics.
Though the health department does not oversee New York City hospitals, it runs several sexual health and vaccination clinics as well as four tuberculosis testing centers. It also offers programs at primary care clinics, giving the department and whoever leads it a foothold in the city’s public health infrastructure. And under city law, the department is already required to offer voter registration forms as part of its standard paperwork, with 643 such forms distributed in the first half of 2025, per a report from the mayor’s office.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene did not respond to a request for comment about how, if at all, its voter registration efforts would change under Martin.
Vot-ER, which has held trainings on “medical racism” and referred to “DEI” as the “bedrock of fair healthcare,” claims to be nonpartisan in compliance with federal election law. In practice, though, the group appears to prioritize traditional Democratic voting blocs.
Applications for vot-ER’s tools ask whether the “majority of your patients” are “24 years old or younger,” “Black/African-American,” or “LGBTQIA+.” And the group suggests doctors tell “undocumented citizens” to register their naturalized families to vote—a move that prompted scrutiny from the Republican National Convention in the leadup to the 2024 election.
“Trusting individuals who violated this nation’s immigration laws to only register friends and family who are lawfully able to register to vote is foolish and dangerous, especially when the patients are not legally allowed to register themselves,” the RNC said in letters to election officials in six swing states.
The letters asked those officials to monitor Vot-ER for possible violations of election law. Vot-ER, the RNC wrote, is “weaponizing the healthcare system … for partisan political purposes.”
Martin himself has implied that the group has an agenda: The time for doctors “being impartial and apolitical,” he told the New York Times in 2020, “is over.”
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