In 2022, the American Medical Association, an organization representing doctors, noted that voting could potentially have health benefits. So we conducted a study that directly tested this idea: We examined whether older Americans – people who are 65 and up – who vote live longer than nonvoters.
Older adults vote at a higher rate than younger adults in the United States. In Wisconsin, the focus of our study, the voting rate of older adults is even higher.
We used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a study which has followed a randomly selected sample of Wisconsin high school graduates since 1957. We compared the long-term health of older adults who voted in the 2008 presidential election to those who did not vote in that election. Using objectively verified voting records from Catalist, which tracks Americans’ voting behavior, along with official National Death Index records, we found that voters were 45% less likely to die within five years after the 2008 election, 37% less likely to die 10 years after the election, and 29% less likely to die 15 years later.
We also examined voting in the 2004 and 2012 presidential elections and found that the results were stronger for more recent elections – those held in 2008 and 2012 – compared to the earlier one held in 2004.
You may wonder whether this is just because healthier people are more likely to vote in the first place.
It’s easier to vote when you’re healthy than when you’re not, but this does not fully explain our results. Voters still had a lower risk of dying when we controlled for demographic factors such as gender, marital status and income, other forms of civic engagement such as volunteering, and a voter’s health status prior to voting.
We also found that those in poorer health to begin with benefited more from voting 15 years later than those who had been healthier before they voted.
Here’s another finding: How someone voted didn’t matter. When we compared what happened to older adults who cast their ballots in person to those who mailed their ballots, we found that both groups had about an equally lower risk of dying over the 15-year period.
It also did not matter whether a voter’s preferred candidate won. We found that although it can be stressful when the candidate you support loses, the people we studied experienced similar long-term health benefits of voting regardless of their political affiliation.
Voters had a lower risk of dying when the researchers controlled for demographic factors such as gender, marital status and income. Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images
Scientists have long known that people who volunteer for nonprofits experience many health benefits, including a longer lifespan.
Voting is, arguably, also an altruistically motivated act. That’s because individual voters are aware that their one vote will not change the outcome of a national election.
If you are wondering why voting predicts lower mortality risk, well, so did we.
One possibility is that as with other civic engagement activities, including volunteering, voting may trigger positive biological responses that support well-being. Other researchers have found ample evidence showing that volunteering can boost the brain’s reward system, reduce stress and even slow some aspects of aging. Although we didn’t test for these in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, they may help explain why people who vote tend to have better health outcomes than those who don’t.
Voting might also improve health through a sense of self-efficacy, civic duty and social connection, since it is both an altruistic and shared activity.
Although the exact explanations aren’t known, studies consistently show a link between volunteering and a lower mortality risk, which suggests that participating in civic life – even something as simple as casting a ballot – may be good for your health, like going for a run or eating vegetables.
Older Americans Who Vote Live Longer Than Those Who Don’t – New Research was originally published by The Conversation and is republished with permission.
The portrait of Reza Valizadeh stands in the Senate Russell Rotunda in front of images of wrongful American detainees that the Foley Foundation has helped bring home. (Jacques Abou-Rizk, MNS)
The morning of Wednesday, May 6, the families of the campaign stood together in the Senate Russell Rotunda holding the portraits of their loved ones.
One of the people holding portraits was Neda Sharghi, a former chair of the campaign, whose brother returned to the U.S. in 2023 after being wrongfully detained in Iran for 5 years, convicted of espionage without a trial.
Sharghi said the challenges of individual advocacy reinforce the value of a campaign made up of families.
“Individual families generally have a hard time getting the attention of the media, senior-level officials, and the administration,” Sharghi said. “We decided that we were going to bring our voices together and advocate as a whole organization.”
While people walked through the portraits set up on easels, Congress was out of session, so no lawmakers were spotted.
“For a lot of these families, it’s the last photo they have of their loved one,” said the artist for the campaign, Isaac Campbell. “Art offers so much opportunity for storytelling and interpretation and reflection that I think it’s really the best way to meet people and remind them that these people are not political issues, they’re human beings.”
Valizadeh is among 42 Americans determined to be wrongfully detained overseas by the Foley Foundation. Because the U.S. does not publicly disclose a list of wrongful detentions abroad, the nonprofit advocacy group researches cases and maintains a list. The Foley Foundations names 16 of the 42 whose families requested public advocacy. These people hail from Florida, California, Massachusetts, Texas, New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. The Bring Our Families Home campaign is a family-led initiative funded by the Foley Foundation.
The Foundation began its work advocating for American hostages and reporter safety in 2014, just 16 days after American journalist James Foley was murdered by ISIS in Syria while covering the civil war.
The concept of the portraits was meant to use the power of art and communicate the humanity behind each individual story.
One of those stories is Zach Shahin, an American businessman arrested in the United Arab Emirates in March 2008. In 2017, a Dubai court sentenced him to spend the rest of his life in prison for a white-collar crime without any evidence, according to his sister-in-law Aida Dagher. Like many families in the campaign, Dagher gave up her career and has worked endlessly to bring her brother-in-law home.
“This is his 19th year,” Dagher said. “We’ve been fighting all the time to get him out. We’re hoping the U.S. government is doing what they should, the UAE government as well. We’re hoping that now finally they will compromise, settle, whatever it takes to release them.”
Wrongfully Detained Americans Overseas
Wrongfully Detained Americans Overseas public.flourish.studio
A Flourish data visualization by Jacques Abou-Rizk
Campbell said the murals are meant to make people stop to think about the scale of what he calls the American hostage crisis.
“It’s hopeful because you look at all those stickers of people coming home, and they far outnumber the people that are still in detainment,” he said. “And that could be the same result for these other families that are in detainment, and hopefully will be, that they’ll come home.”
Among those involved is Ryan Fayhee, a former federal prosecutor and board member of the Foley Foundation who now conducts pro-bono work for families of those wrongfully detained abroad. His pro bono work began with Paul Whelan in 2018, a veteran arrested in Russia for alleged espionage, before being released as part of a United States-Russia prisoner swap in 2024. He now represents Valizadeh, who is being held in Evin Prison in Tehran.
“He’d already been in Evin Prison last July when the Israeli strike targeted the prison,” Fayhee said. “With a continuing blackout in Iran and threats from the IRGC to his family, we really haven’t been able to communicate in any way, and that’s deeply concerning.”
But Fayhee expressed hope over the changing landscape of American hostage and detainee recovery over the past decade. In 2015, after Foley’s murder, President Barack Obama signed Presidential Policy Directive 30, which created the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs and restructured U.S. policy toward terrorist negotiations. In 2020, Congress passed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act, which codified some of the processes set up in the policy directive.
“Even from the time when I began doing work of this sort with Paul Whelan and his family… we’re just light years ahead of where we were in terms of the resources, the personnel, the engagement, the willingness to resolve,” Fayhee said.
Dagher, who lives in Texas, stressed the importance of the Foley Foundation and the campaign in bringing these families together.
“[Zach Shahin’s] wife cries every single day for the last 18 years,” Dagher said. “That’s why I left my career… But I think finally we’ll get him out. I feel that this year they will be out.”
Jacques Abou-Rizk is a graduate student journalist at Northwestern Medill.
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