Despite the simultaneous crises the United States now faces–economic recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, the states must carry out their responsibility for conducting fair elections. To do so, they need significant additional federal funds to effectively implement voting by mail.
The reasons for this are obvious. Voting in person makes it more difficult to follow the guidelines on social distancing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). People vote in polling places with widely shared machines, and during a presidential election many polling locations are more crowded than usual. In-person voting during the April Wisconsin presidential primary resulted in voters and poll workers getting infected with COVID-19. This should not be allowed to happen again. But how can it be avoided?
The above excerpt was originally published in Just Security.
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