A democratic reform whose time has come ...

On voting by mail, Donald Trump is bucking not only public health, but also public opinion. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll:

Most Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the government to require mail-in ballots for the Nov. 3 presidential election if the coronavirus outbreak still threatens the public this autumn ... the poll conducted on Monday and Tuesday found that 72% of all U.S. adults, including 79% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, supported a requirement for mail-in ballots as a way to protect voters ...

People know that putting voters and poll workers in danger as happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday is just wrong.

Voting by mail is not some novelty. You know who has been voting by mail decades? The far flung troops of the U.S. military. We put these people all over the world, touting their service to their country. But we don't take away their right to cast a ballot. The image is from a Florida campaign to turn out Air Force voters in 2016.

Managing massive elections that include voting by mail is not easy. State and local authorities need to get to work planning now; state legislatures need to remove any procedural requirements that would get in the way; the federal government needs to include funding in the next stimulus bill to help localities get this done for the sake of our health and our democracy.

Sixteen states currently actively discourage absentee voting by requiring voters to certify to an "excuse" in any election when they wish vote by mail. The procedure to get a ballot is often difficult and requires multiple steps by the voter -- getting an application, returning the application by a set date to the election office, receiving a ballot, returning the ballot by mail so it arrives by election day -- and usually paying for postage.

Though most of these 16 states are in the South and Republican controlled, several are Democratic controlled at the state level and should be pushed to change their procedures in this crisis. There are some winnable fights among these: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, in response to his state's emergency, has in recent days begun the process of getting rid of New York's "absentee excuse" requirement for voting by mail. This is the minimum that has to happen everywhere before November.

The All On The Line campaign (this is the residue of Organizing for Obama/America) is leading a national campaign to make voting easier. Many Indivisible groups have local voting rights campaigns. Wherever we are, there's work to do to make voting easier now ...