Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3. Here’s a reason to show up that has nothing to do with who wins: Older adults in a long-running Wisconsin study who voted in the 2008 presidential election were less likely to die over the next 15 years than those who stayed home.
That’s the finding of a study published in March in The Journals of Gerontology. Older voters had a 45% lower risk of dying within five years, a 37% lower risk within 10 years and a 29% lower risk within 15 years, compared with nonvoters.
Those are the kinds of numbers drug companies dream about. But before you start treating your ballot like a vitamin, it’s worth understanding what this study actually shows — and what it doesn’t.
Because the real lesson here isn’t about voting. It’s about something you can do every day of the year.
What the researchers found
Femida Handy of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara Konrath of Indiana University used the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has followed people who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. They were around 69 at the time of the 2008 presidential election.
This wasn’t based on people saying they voted. The researchers used verified voting records and matched them against the National Death Index, so the study doesn’t depend on people remembering, or admitting, whether they voted.
They also adjusted for things that affect both voting and health: wealth, education, marital status, political affiliation, volunteering and health before the election.
The link held up whether people voted in person or absentee. In-person voters had a 46% lower risk of dying within five years, and remote voters had a 42% lower risk, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s reporting on the study.
It didn’t depend on party, either. “It doesn’t matter who you vote for,” Handy told the Inquirer.
One more twist: People who were in poorer health to begin with appeared to benefit more over 15 years.
Why I’m not ready to call it a cure
As you might have guessed, the study shows an association, not cause and effect. Proving cause would usually take a randomized trial, and nobody’s going to randomly order some people to vote and others to stay home.
Next, consider who didn’t vote. In this group, nearly 89% cast a ballot in 2008. That means the nonvoters were a small slice — roughly 1 in 9 people — and likely different in ways no data set fully captures.
Earlier research has already shown that healthier people are more likely to vote later on. The researchers tried to adjust for that, but you can’t measure everything that keeps someone home on Election Day.
Neuroscientist Ben Rein, who wasn’t involved in the study, put it plainly to Texas Public Radio: “Voting isn’t a medication that extends your life.” His point is that voters tend to have something else going for them, and it’s that other trait that’s tied to living longer.
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A much bigger study points the same way
If one study of Wisconsin retirees were all we had, I’d file this under “interesting.” But it isn’t.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki tracked more than 3 million Finnish citizens age 30 and older who were eligible to vote in that country’s 1999 parliamentary elections. They followed them through the end of 2020.
After adjusting for age, men who didn’t vote had a 73% higher risk of dying than men who did. For women, it was 63% higher. The gap between voters and nonvoters was even bigger than the gap between people with only a basic education and those with a college-level education, according to the study.
That’s striking, because the researchers point out that education’s link to how long people live is one of the most firmly established patterns in the field.
The likely reason: purpose and connection
So if the ballot isn’t magic, what is? Handy’s own theory is that voting reflects something deeper: a sense of purpose, a connection to your community and a belief that what you do matters.
That fits what researchers have found about volunteering. Reviews of earlier studies, cited by Handy and Konrath, have found that older adults who volunteer tend to have a lower risk of dying than those who don’t.
Purpose shows up on its own, too. A 2019 study in JAMA Network Open followed nearly 7,000 adults over 50. Those with the weakest sense of purpose were about 2.4 times as likely to die during the study period as those with the strongest, the researchers found.
My take: Voting is probably one sign of a life that’s connected and engaged. That’s likely what’s doing the work, not the ballot itself.
What to do with this
By all means, vote if you’re eligible, whoever you’re voting for. But don’t stop there.
The bigger takeaway is to build the habits voting seems to stand for: staying involved, staying connected and doing things that matter to someone besides you. Volunteer. Join a club. Check on a neighbor. Take a class.
If you need ideas that won’t cost much, here are 17 cheap things to do in retirement. And if isolation is creeping in, read what Nancy Guthrie’s life can teach about avoiding loneliness.
There’s a money angle, too. If staying engaged helps you live longer, your savings may need to last longer than you planned. As we’ve reported, the odds of reaching 90 are higher than many retirement plans assume.
So vote. Then go find the next thing that gets you out of the house and involved. Your community will be better for it, and you may be around longer to enjoy it.
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