No-excuse absentee bills have moved in three more states recently: Virginia, where a bill has passed and awaits Gov. Ralph Northam’s signature, as well as Delaware and New Hampshire. These states should move quickly to adopt this method of absentee voting.

The remaining states should join them, and if they can’t — for example, because a constitutional amendment is required, as is the case in New York — should consider designating the declaration of a statewide public health emergency as a permissible reason for requesting an absentee ballot.

If things get so bad that in-person voting becomes impractical, then states may even consider conducting elections almost entirely by mail, as is already done in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington. Maryland is investigating the possibility of such a switch.

Major election-year changes to voting laws like this would be hard to carry out, and should be made sparingly and only with deliberation — particularly when they precede a high-turnout general election. This year, however, it may simply be due diligence for states to at least consider the possibility. We may be in precisely the kind of unusual circumstance that warrants big changes to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised.

But we should resist the temptation to permit internet-based voting, which some states are experimenting with in smaller contexts. In an ill-advised move, the Puerto Rico legislature recently passed a bill to authorize electronic voting; it’s awaiting the governor’s signature. While we should do everything we can to make voting accessible, the consensus of cybersecurity experts is that we are simply not prepared to ensure the security of online voting. In this case, the cure would be worse than the disease.

Permit early processing of absentee ballots. At present, 15 states do not permit absentee ballots to be processed until Election Day. Among them is Michigan, which is allowing absentee voting for the first time in a presidential election (rather than limiting it to those with a particular excuse). Unsurprisingly, absentee ballots were heavily requested the primary, which has raised concerns that results could be substantially delayed if there is a similar surge in November.

A worst-case scenario would be if Michigan, the state with the closest win-loss margin in 2016, is again one of the decisive states in the 2020 election and we are unable to project a winner on election night. (Another decisive state, Pennsylvania, which also just adopted no-excuse absentee voting, also forbids processing absentee ballots until Election Day and could find itself in a similar situation.) It’s worrisome that the Michigan Legislature, however, has so far resisted calls to make the job of elections administrators easier by permitting the processing of early ballots.