 Long lines, crowded rooms, polling places aren't exactly ideal locations for social distancing. But with an election looming and no end in sight to the coronavirus crisis, it's time to start asking, how do we vote when the places where we vote are closed? This presidential election is going to be unlike any other ever held in American history. How does American democracy adjust to all of this? A lot of voting happens in schools. So if schools are closed, how do you vote? We have barely seven months to go until the November national elections. If this crisis goes on for months, will we be able to make sure that all voters can cast ballots and do so safely? So, can the election be postponed or canceled? What does the Constitution say? The Constitution gives Congress the power to set the time for the election. That's not something that could be changed by, say, a presidential order. Rick Hassan is a legal scholar who runs the popular election law blog. The Constitution provides in the 20th amendment that if there's no choice of a presidential elector by this date in January, then we go to the rules of succession. So it might be the Speaker of the House or President Pro Temp in the Senate. The more immediate question is, what happens to the handful of states that still have to choose their presidential nominee and congressional candidates? If social distancing remains an everyday reality for Americans by the summer, what's to stop states from canceling their elections altogether and letting the parties pick the candidates? Primary elections are enshrined in state statute. So while states can give governors kind of emergency power to delay primaries, I don't think they can be able to cancel them without a change in state statute. So what's the solution? How do we ensure a free, fair and safe election by November? One idea floated by a pair of Democratic senators is to conduct the entire 2020 election by mail. The idea even has the backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. I think that we'll probably be moving to vote by mail. That's why we wanted to have more resources in this third bill that just was signed by the president. But Rick Hassan says you shouldn't get your hopes up. The stimulus bill did not include a requirement that Democrats are pushing that states offer no excuse absentee balloting. I think it's unlikely that there's going to be a standalone bill that could pass through Congress, especially if Congress is not meeting regularly. Mail-in voting has become a political football. Republicans, including President Trump, are resisting it. It shouldn't be mail-in voting. It should be you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself. So this is going to be a state-by-state issue. Vote by mail is growing in popularity in the US. In 2016, nearly one in five Americans voted by mail. In fact, five states conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. And 28 states and DC allow voters to request mail-in absentee ballots for any reason. But the magnitude of requests this year is likely to be overwhelming. And that's before we even take into account the states that have very little vote by mail infrastructure in place. Time is running out to get up to speed. A vote by mail system tool has significant hurdles to overcome. Many more ballots need to be printed. They need to be proofread. They require a lot of money, requires a lot of infrastructure. You need to be checking signatures. You need sophisticated machines to sort those ballots. You also need accurate voter rolls. It's a big undertaking. Congress provided $400 million in election preparedness grants in the recent coronavirus stimulus package. Whether that's enough or how the states will even get the money is still an open question. The $400 million entry really was, I think, less than one page of the bill. And there weren't any mandates attached to that $400 million. So states have a lot of freedom to do with their individual grants as they see fit. Conducting elections under normal circumstances is hard enough. Preparing a nation as big as the United States to vote in a pandemic is going to be an enormous undertaking. So if I was talking to an election official, a state that has not done a lot of vote by mail, I would say, you know, you're going to need more employees. You're going to need to buy some new equipment. Well, there will need to be a big kind of public education effort. I think to tell voters that there are ways you can vote without having to show up at a polling station. It's really on, I think, governors and on state election officials and on the media and individual states to publicize that for people. Will we be prepared by November? Ready or not, in just a few short months, the show must go on. Elections were disrupted in parts of the country during the 1918 flu pandemic, but the elections went on. Elections went on during the Civil War. So we've got seven months. We're a smart country. We can figure out how to make this work.