The Atlantic

Vote-by-Mail Can Save the 2020 Election

It’s a time-tested and straightforward solution, and the time to plan for it is now.
Source: Print Collector / Hulton Archive / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Even in ordinary times, voting is hard for many Americans, requiring them to wait in long lines and, in some cases, forgo wages as a result. Of course, these are not ordinary times. Today, and possibly even this November, the potential cost of casting a ballot in person on Election Day could be considerably higher, given that crowds and shared surfaces (such as the interface of an electronic voting machine) present perfect environments for spreading the coronavirus.

The election is too important to let fall prey to this virus. Americans must ensure that the country’s democratic process moves forward as scheduled. And there is one time-tested and straightforward way to do that: nationwide vote by mail.

[Ken Harbaugh: The vote must go on]

The question of expanding access to voting by

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic16 min read
The Georgia Voters Biden Really, Really Needs
Photographs by Arielle Gray for The Atlantic With 224 days to go before an election that national Democrats are casting as a matter of saving democracy, a 21-year-old canvasser named Kebo Stephens knocked on a scuffed apartment door in rural southwes
The Atlantic8 min read
Don’t Give Up on Tourism. Just Do It Better.
In 1956, the poet Elizabeth Bishop worried about the imprudence and absurdity of going abroad. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” she writes in her poem “Questions of Travel.” “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in thi
The Atlantic8 min read
How Congress Could Protect Free Speech on Campus
Last year at Harvard, three Israeli Jews took a course at the Kennedy School of Government. They say that because of their ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin, their professor subjected them to unequal treatment, trying to suppress their speech

Related Books & Audiobooks