Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, let's talk about voting. I speak to Dr. Alastair Martin, an emergency department

physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the founder and executive director of Vote ER, an organization at the crossroads of health and civic engagement.

Let's listen. Dr. Martin, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. Tell me what is Vote ER? Thank you for having

me, Dr. Sharfstein. Vote ER is an organization that exists at the intersection between health

and voting. And it does so to help our patients and our providers and colleagues vote like their health

depends on it because it does.

Bodiar started from the simple premise that in this country we have over 50 million people

who are not registered to vote, but who are eligible.

And when you look at the demographic data,

when you look at who the folks are that make up that 50 million,

that's a whole country's worth of people who are not part of the political process.

When you look at the demographic data,

the folks who are often not registered to vote, but eligible, are the same exact folks who are our most vulnerable patients, folks who are most marginalized by our health care system.

Both groups end up being younger.

They end up being more likely than not people of color. And they tend

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