New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver jokingly referred to Kim Wyman, her counterpart from Washington state, as “the most popular girl at the dance right now,” saying the longtime Washington elections official has been indispensable to others trying to rapidly accommodate more voting by mail. LaRose said he’s talked to other secretaries of states about the importance of postage-paid envelopes and having drop boxes for voters who wanted to drop them off in person.

Some states are taking legislative steps to expand mail-in voting in their state and otherwise protect voters from the virus. Virginia became a no-excuse absentee voting state after Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam signed a series of voting access laws in mid-April, which were already making their way through the state Legislature before the pandemic.

Other states are making temporary changes. The secretary of state and attorney general in New Hampshire, which requires voters to provide an excuse to vote absentee, co-authored a memo announcing that they would treat concern over coronavirus as a valid excuse in this year’s elections.“Voters should not have to choose between their health and exercising their constitutional right to vote,” they wrote .

But there are gradations of preparedness, even among no-excuse absentee ballot states. In Arizona, which has a permanent early voting list of citizens who automatically receive absentee ballots every election, 79 percent of voters voted by mail in the 2018 midterms, according to data collected by the Brennan Center , which advocates a wide swath of voting reforms. But other states with no-excuse absentee voting were in the single-digits and might not be prepared for a big surge of mail-voting volume.

Michigan and Pennsylvania, two of the most important 2020 presidential battlegrounds, are also two of the states at greatest risk of a Wisconsin-like failure — where voters reported requesting absentee ballots but never received them — come November, said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the nonprofit Vote at Home Institute and the former director of elections for Denver, Colo., during the state’s transition to vote by mail. Michigan and Pennsylvania recently enacted no-excuse absentee voting, meaning they have little infrastructure and have managed only low levels of voting by mail in the past, said McReynolds, creating more opportunity for error.

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“If states don't prepare now, they won't have enough equipment,” McReynolds said. “They won't have what they need by November and it's not really up to them to decide if vote by mail is going to happen. Voters can decide whether or not vote by mail is going to happen.”

Wyman, the Washington secretary of state, said running a successful in-person voting system does not easily translate to mail voting.

“You actually are conducting two elections, every time you have an election. You have to build out your entire infrastructure for poll sites, and then have your full infrastructure for vote by mail, essentially,” Wyman said.

And Wyman and others ticked through a laundry list of potential barriers states might face in trying to conduct a mail-in election with little prior experience.

“It is impractical for the federal government to dictate that every state must transition to vote by mail,” said LaRose, the Ohio secretary of state. “For those states that don’t have a history of doing it, it's simply not like a flip of a switch where they just go from all in-person voting to all vote-by-mail. And for those states where maybe 2 or 3 percent historically have been vote by mail, just the logistics of doing that is a big undertaking. Thankfully, again, in Ohio, we were sort of well positioned to make this transition. But that's not the case in every state.”