Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports on an unlikely political battleground.

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.

Initially, the Pennsylvania-based institute was relying on “voter support” materials created by its own staff. In more recent years, however, it has turned to the nonprofit Vot-ER, which develops “nonpartisan civic engagement tools” for “every corner of the healthcare system.”

Founded by an emergency room physician at Harvard Medical School, Alister Martin, who served as an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, Vot-ER has helped more than 50,000 doctors register their patients to vote.