The next legislation to pass Congress must ensure all eligible Americans can vote safely by fully funding (roughly $5 billion) and requiring all states to provide these things: no-excuse absentee voting by mail; at least 20 days of early voting; curbside or drive-through voting; accommodations for the disabled; and accessible voting places in rural and tribal areas.

A bill introduced by Senator Kamala Harris and another by Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden would accomplish this goal. Mr. Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, strongly oppose anything that makes it safer or easier for Americans to vote. But, as citizens, we cannot allow their naked partisanship and unabashed disdain for democracy to strip us of our constitutional right to vote securely.

Second, the United States has a rare opportunity to accelerate our recovery from the coronavirus while starting to restore an ethos of service to American culture. To reopen our states and towns safely, we need to hugely scale up testing and our capacity to trace the contacts of those infected to enable them to be isolated and cared for.

This will require trained contact tracers who can interview, assess and support those quarantined, and potentially administer vaccines. Experts estimate the United States will need 100,000 to 300,000 contact tracers (costing approximately $3.6 billion per 100,000 workers annually) with skills that match those of most high school graduates. We can recruit this work force from public health personnel as well as the newly unemployed, college students, recent graduates, idled Peace Corps and AmeriCorps volunteers, and retirees.

Congress should fund both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the states to establish this “Health Force,” as proposed by Senators Michael Bennet and Kirsten Gillibrand. Along with Senator Chris Coons’s plan to expand AmeriCorps tenfold to 750,000 workers over three years, these investments would enable Americans from all backgrounds to perform vital national service when our health, education and infrastructure needs (such as expanding broadband access) are more urgent than ever.

These important civic initiatives would strengthen our democracy and national cohesion, providing a down payment on more ambitious efforts to rebuild our health system and economy, while increasing opportunity and equity. That is why the anti-government, reward-the-rich Republican leadership in Congress will undoubtedly oppose such efforts.

Yet in this moment of crisis, thankfully, nothing can happen without bipartisan compromise. Protecting our elections and expanding national service are imperatives that congressional Democrats must insist upon in negotiations over upcoming coronavirus legislation so that, despite Donald Trump, we can again emerge from profound crisis with renewed national strength and unity.

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