Late last October—before health officials in central China began racing to contain a mysterious outbreak of viral pneumonia, before DIY hand sanitizer tutorials flooded YouTube, before nearly 200,000 people in the US had died of Covid-19—legislators in Pennsylvania came together for a rare moment of bipartisan collaboration. For the first time since 1937, Republicans and Democrats passed a series of broad electoral reforms. Their constituents, long bound by some of the most restrictive voting rules in the nation, would now enjoy some of the most flexible. Like millions of other Americans, Pennsylvanians would be able to vote by mail without providing a reason for doing so.
“We were certainly preparing for a surge in mail-in ballots, just because people could do it now,” says Kenneth Lawrence Jr., who oversees elections in Montgomery County, a suburban and rural area just northwest of Philadelphia. With the primary scheduled for April 28, he and his colleagues had about six months to launch the expanded system. They began scaling up their mail-in operations and sending out ballot applications, helped by a new state-run online portal. Then, on March 18, Pennsylvania recorded its first Covid-19 death. A week later, lawmakers voted to delay the primary to early June. Now it wasn't just the mail-in system that needed an overhaul; traditional polling places, ill-equipped for social distancing, would too.
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