Nonprofit full of partisans leads effort to register Pennsylvania hospital patients to vote

 By Monica Showalter

Should sick and vulnerable people in hospitals be harassed by partisan operatives to register to vote?

Not any more than timeshare salesmen should be allowed into hospitals to sell their products to patients too sick to get away from them.

But that seems to be the name of the game in Pennsylvania hospitals, where actual doctors and other medical personnel are being dispatched to register patients to vote in the upcoming election, with not-so-subtle pressure on them to vote Democrat.

According to the Washington Free Beacon:

Many patients at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, an 89-bed facility affiliated with Pennsylvania State University, suffer from schizophrenia, substance abuse, depression, or bipolar disorder. They cannot complete the "activities of daily living," the hospital’s inpatient clinic states. Some are "suicidal, aggressive, or dangerous to themselves or others."

During their stay, which is often involuntary, patients participate in group counseling, learn strategies for stress management, have their medication adjusted, and interact with therapy animals.

They can also partake in a less orthodox therapeutic activity: registering to vote.

Located in a swing state that could decide the 2024 election, the hospital asks psychiatric inpatients, regardless of diagnosis, if they would be interested in "voter registration tools" that let them check their nearest polling station and register to vote online. Patients can also request a mail-in ballot with "assistance" from hospital staff, according to a pair of papers about the project, which began in 2020.

Since then, the hospital has continued registering patients—even those who are not near discharge and have not yet been stabilized—on the grounds that voting, as the institute puts it, is a "therapeutic tool" that "helps empower patients and makes them feel good."

"Voting is an important part of the recovery process," Julie Graziane, a geriatric psychiatrist who leads the hospital’s civic engagement efforts, said in a press release. Neither she nor Ruth Moore, the hospital’s head of community engagement, responded to requests for comment.

Had enough? We all know what this is, it's the same garbage we see in other questionable voter-registration drives -- of welfare recipients in government offices, of illegal immigrants supposedly because "mi familia vota," of emptied jails and homeless encampments, and other Democrat tricks of the trade. Oftentimes they don't need these people to vote, they just need the registration so that someone can get hold of that ballot, and fill it out for them.

Obviously, in Pennsylvania, where no reforms have taken place since the travesty-election of 2020, the machine is cranking on up, harassing vulnerable, sick, out-of-their-mind patients with a well-organized effort to have doctors involved with this wear a special bar-code scanner to sign these people up.

The Beacon points out the obvious problems with this:

Critics say that Vot-ER, which hosts trainings on "medical racism" and partners with the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, is turning doctors into political activists and patients into political capital. The transformation has raised ethical questions about the power dynamic between patient and provider, the capacity of institutionalized people to give consent, and the potential for partisan pushiness in the exam room, where political chit-chat was long seen as off-limits.

The message sent is simple: Sign up to vote the way the leftists do, or no medical care for you.

It represents a stunning corruption of the medical field, turning doctors into partisan political salespeople instead of dispassionate medical caregivers, and adds one more problem for patients trying to recover from a host of serious illnesses, both mental and physical. The last thing any of those people wants to think about is politics and elections.

But that's irrelevant, all these organizers, funded by the usual suspects in the foundation world want is a registration, they'll take care of it from there.

It's outrageous. And while it's hard to say when it will stop, or all the damage it will do to trust in the doctor-patient relationship, sunlight on this sleazy operation may provide some kind of disinfectant. No medical establishment should ever turn itself into a front for reaping votes for Democrats.

Read the whole thing here.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/nonprofit_full_of_partisans_leads_effort_to_register_pennsylvania_hospital_patients_to_vote.html