New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) has appointed as his new health czar a progressive activist-physician whose organization has registered psychiatric inpatients and other highly vulnerable patients to vote inside medical facilities.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Mamdani on January 31 selected Alister Martin to lead the citys Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, placing a committed political operative at the helm of one of the nations most powerful public health bureaucracies. Martin, a former emergency room doctor and onetime staffer to Vice President Kamala Harris, founded the nonprofit Vot-ER in 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic, with the explicit mission of turning hospitals and clinics into voter registration hubs.
Vot-ER produces badges, posters, and digital tools that enable doctors and nurses to register patients to vote during clinical encounters, blurring the line between medical care and political mobilization. One of its early institutional partners, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, is an inpatient facility that treats individuals with severe psychotic disorders and other acute mental illnesses.
Citing the supposed "therapeutic" benefits of civic participation, the institute has used Vot-ERs materials since at least 2021 to register patients hospitalized for schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, and life-threatening addictions. Some of those patients were involuntarily committed, raising serious concerns about informed consent and whether individuals in crisis are being used as instruments in a broader political project.
"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 Universitys 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?"
Those ethical red flags have not slowed Martins efforts, as he has helped more than 50,000 clinicians integrate voter registration into their practice. Vot-ERs tools have been deployed in cancer centers, emergency rooms, hospices, and even neonatal intensive care units, where some providers now ask the parents of critically ill infants about their voter registration status while their children fight for life.
Critics argue that this politicization of the exam room is ripe for abuse and undermines the trust that should exist between patients and physicians. With Martin now in charge of New York Citys health department, they warn that intrusive questions about voting and partisan-tinged activism could become routine in many of the citys public health settings.
While the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene does not directly control New York Citys hospitals, it operates sexual health and vaccination clinics and runs four tuberculosis testing centers. It also embeds programs in primary care practices, giving the commissioner significant leverage over how public health is practiced and how far political initiatives can reach into everyday medical encounters.
Under city law, the department is already required to provide voter registration forms as part of its standard paperwork, with 643 forms distributed in the first half of 2025, according to a report from the mayors office. That statutory baseline gives Martin a ready-made platform from which to expand Vot-ER-style efforts, should he choose to push the department further into electoral activism.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene did not respond to questions about whether its voter registration activities will be broadened or restructured under Martins leadership. The silence leaves open the possibility that a health agency funded by taxpayers could become an even more aggressive vehicle for political engagement among patients.
Vot-ER, which has hosted trainings on "medical racism" and has described "DEI" as the "bedrock of fair healthcare," insists it is nonpartisan in order to comply with federal election law. In practice, however, its targeting strategy appears tailored to traditional Democratic constituencies rather than to the electorate as a whole.
Applications for Vot-ERs tools ask whether "the majority of your patients" are "24 years old or younger," "Black/African-American," or "LGBTQIA+," categories that align closely with the modern progressive coalition. The group also advises clinicians to encourage "undocumented citizens"a legally incoherent phraseto register their naturalized relatives to vote, a recommendation that drew sharp scrutiny from the Republican National Convention ahead of the 2024 election.
"Trusting individuals who violated this nations 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. Those letters urged officials to keep a close watch on Vot-ER for potential violations of election law and abuses of the healthcare system.
Vot-ER, the RNC wrote, is "weaponizing the healthcare system for partisan political purposes." That charge underscores a broader conservative concern that progressive activists are systematically converting neutral civic institutionsschools, churches, and now hospitalsinto engines of left-wing political power.
Martin has himself hinted that Vot-ERs work is not ideologically neutral, rejecting the traditional expectation that physicians remain above the partisan fray. The time for doctors "being impartial and apolitical," he told the New York Times in 2020, "is over."
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