Kirsten Gillibrand pushes curbside voting, election holiday as solution to coronavirus challenges

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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said Monday that the federal government should take several steps, including expanding curbside voting, to help voters safely make it to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want every tool available for elections because we don’t know where COVID is going to be at that stage," she told Just the News. "And certainly vulnerable people won’t want to be voting in person. So we want to make sure there’s a vote via mail component in all states."

The senator added that "we want things like curbside voting to be available. We’ve used that in some states for seniors, for the disability community. We want to make sure that’s up and running."

"We want to make sure Election Day is a day off and we want to make sure people can vote early because that's another way, if COVID is still very much an issue, if you could vote for two weeks before the election [on] any day you want, you could spread out the number of voters who have to go to the voting site," Gillibrand went on.

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The impact of COVID-19 on voting became an issue last week when Wisconsin went ahead with the state's primary election, prompting uproar from people like Democratic strategist James Carville. Preliminary results indicated absentee ballots accounted for about seven in 10 of all ballots cast, compared with 12 percent of ballots cast during a Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year.

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President Trump has expressed hesitation about mail-in voting, citing the potential for fraud. “Sending everyone a ballot opens up wide possibilities for ballots to be intercepted, for ballots to be stolen from mailboxes, or for vote harvesting to occur," Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh told The Washington Post.

A number of states have confronted the possibility that they might need to alter their voting strategies in the coming months.

For example, Pennsylvania counties have processed about 283,000 absentee and mail-in ballots for the commonwealth's June 2 primary. The Department of State said 89,000 absentee ballot requests have already been processed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.