During an interview with Tamron Hall that aired on Thursday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) made another pitch for her VoteSafe Act of 2020 — legislation she has touted as needed to transform the American voting system in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
Harris referred to California’s vote-by-mail laws, which are already in place and noted what she perceived to be the benefits of being able to vote from home.
“Again, we need to be smarter, and we need to be safer,” she said. “I have proposed what I call the VoteSafe Act. It’s a number of things. It’s to encourage, of course, vote-by-mail. I’m from the state of California. We have vote-by-mail. You know, I want to say to everybody who doesn’t have it — you will really enjoy it. You just sit down at your table with a cup of coffee and figure out who you’re going to vote for, and put that in the mail. It’s really easy. For those states or folks who don’t want to vote-by-mail, we should have curbside voting. People should be able to drive up to the curb and vote and keep moving. We should make sure that we encourage states to start having a standard for what wait times should be. In Wisconsin, to your point, people are waiting in that line for 2-3 hours. People should not have to wait those amounts of time just to exercise their right as a citizen to vote.”
Harris was not optimistic about the prospects of election laws being changed before the November general election. She added that even if he wanted to, President Donald Trump could not change the election laws, either.
“Listen, first of all, there’s a bit of confusion,” Harris continued. “Let’s clear it up. The president does not have the power to change the election. It would have to be an act of the United States Congress. I don’t see that happening. Based on where we are today, I believe the election for who will be the next president of the United States will occur in November as was planned. What we do is we have to put in place, then, and the ability for people to be safe and vote. Look what happened in Wisconsin. We just learned seven voters in Wisconsin have been diagnosed with COVID-19. People shouldn’t have to choose between their personal health and exercising their constitutional right as a patriot, to have their voice weigh in on who will be the next president of the United States.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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