Building Power, Advancing Health Equity: Insights From Voting and Beyond

In their impactful work, Rushovich et al. (p. 300) Investigate the effects of passing the US Voting Rights Act in 1965 on population health inequities. The Voting Rights Act was created to prevent racial discrimination at the polls, and the provision of voting rights led to dramatic improvements in health for Black, but not White, infants. This instructive research pushes usto consider both social and political determinants of health and to interrogate the role of racism in such analyses. Voting is a critical, albeit often overlooked, factor influencing population health. Although the field of public health is beginning to study voting as a determinant of health, it must also move further upstream to consider, more broadly, how power creates and maintains health inequities.