Joseph Cirincione is the President of the Ploughshares Fund.WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) along with eight of his House colleagues, introduced legislation to authorize the construction of a memorial to American political activist and philosopher Thomas Paine. Zack Brown is a policy associate at Ploughshares Fund. “Why do we need to go through that?” Raskin asked. “Already people are expressing in public opinion polls that they are afraid to go vote.” “Logically, their position is completely indefensible,” he said. And with Republicans in control of the Senate and White House, that seems unlikely.
Republicans have traditionally resisted widespread mail-in voting, with President Trump claiming the practice is “ripe for fraud.” To implement the practice by November, states would need billions of dollars in federal funding. More daunting still is the political opposition.
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Many states have no prior experience with mail-in voting on such a massive scale, while the voters themselves would need education on how to ensure their ballots are counted. Raskin admitted this solution isn’t without its logistical hurdles. “The voter turnout is much higher under mail-in voting than in states that just have the traditional ‘show up at the polling place on election day.’” “Mail-in voting works,” he explained, pointing to states like Oregon, Washington, and Utah where the practice is widespread. Raskin’s solution? Expand mail-in voting as a viable option. “Precinct polling places across the state were closed because they couldn’t get anybody to go work the polls.” The average precinct worker in the United States is in their mid-to-late sixties, meaning election day staffers are particularly vulnerable to the virus.
Out of 180 polling sites in Milwaukee, only five were open. Wisconsin’s presidential primary last week demonstrated the issues clearly. One of those functions is ensuring the ability of everyday Americans to vote safely, an activity suddenly threatened by the coronavirus. “At a certain point, we just have to say we are one society, and there are certain basic functions that we have to use government to meet.” And it’s a huge public health problem, and a moral problem, and a political problem,” he said. “It may be that the COVID crisis was able to do, in the final analysis, what Bernie Sanders’ campaign didn’t do,” Raskin continued, pointing to the massive rise in unemployment since the pandemic started and the corresponding spike in the medically uninsured. “When we get through this, we’re going to be in an age where the progressive spirit is dominant,” he said. Raskin, a member of both the House leadership and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, believes the left-leaning nature of the principles outlined in last week’s letter reveals a political shift within the Democratic Party.
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