How could that money be used? For starters, to ensure that state voting rolls are as accurate as possible and that every registered voter receives, at the very least, an application for a mail ballot — although it would be better to send the ballot itself. The money could be used to pay for the printing of enough ballots and envelopes for every registered voter. According to print vendors, orders for ballots and envelopes would need to be placed by early summer to be filled in time for November’s election. And the money could also be used to pay the postage on all those envelopes, so that we don’t institute a modern-day poll tax.

Speaking of postage, the government needs to stop playing games and fund the Postal Service, which is of course essential to a successful vote by mail.

And what about security? It’s true that mail voting has vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The good news is that states like Oregon and Colorado, where nearly all voting is done by mail, run extremely secure elections, thanks to common-sense measures.

For example, bar codes help ensure that ballots are coming from the voters they were sent to, and new ballot-tracking software allows voters to check whether their filled-out ballots were successfully delivered. Ballots with signatures that don’t match a voter’s file don’t get counted, but voters whose ballot is rejected should have the chance to resolve that issue. Voters can also place their filled-out ballots in secure, video-monitored drop boxes. In short, none of this is rocket science, but states without existing mail-voting systems need to get going right away.

Far more dangerous than individual voter fraud, which is always very rare, is the potential hacking of voter rolls by hostile countries like Russia and China. That could disenfranchise large numbers of eligible voters. To minimize this risk, voter rolls should be up-to-date, and offline copies should be saved regularly to check against any suspicious changes.

States need money for all of this, as well as for expanding online registration so that those who have been displaced by the pandemic can vote even if they are living somewhere new. And states need to adopt at least two weeks of early voting, to keep polling places from getting overcrowded.

No voting method is free of error, of course, and there will surely be missteps — ballots lost, voters wrongly rejected for a signature mismatch — but what is the alternative? The coronavirus doesn’t care about the electoral calendar.