OK, but what about November?

President Trump cannot cancel the general election, as The Times’s Alexander Burns explains. The Constitution mandates that the president’s term expire on Jan. 20; short of a constitutional amendment, that isn’t changing.

But Congress could vote to delay the election a couple of months, as Dominic Holden reports at BuzzFeed. That’s still highly unlikely, and it’s too early to tell whether there would be any public health benefit to doing so. Justin Levitt, who led the Justice Department’s voting section during the Obama administration, told Mr. Holden, “If virus fears are bad enough in early November that you can’t hold an election in many places, they’re still going to be that bad on Dec. 31.”

[Related: “Trump Can’t Cancel the Election. But States Could Do It for Him.”]

The United States has held elections during a pandemic before. At the height of the 1918 flu, midterm elections proceeded relatively normally, according to a 2010 article by Jason Marisam in Election Law Journal. Despite bans on public gatherings, there was little public debate about postponement, in part, he says, because of “the push for public displays of civic-mindedness” during World War I. But turnout was significantly depressed, and, as John M. Barry notes in The Times, government officials and newspapers misled the public about how dangerous that flu really was: All told, it killed some 675,000 Americans.

[Related: “We Held an Election During the 1918 Flu Epidemic. We Can Hold an Election Now.”]

Revolutionize the presidential voting process

The presidential election is far enough away that its voting process can be overhauled. To that end, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have introduced a bill that would guarantee every American a secure mail-in paper ballot and help states pay for printing, self-sealing envelopes, ballot tracking and postage. In-person polling sites need to remain open for those unable to vote by mail, so the bill would require all states to hold at least 20 days of early voting to cut down on crowding.

Democrats should refuse to pass any big stimulus bill unless it includes such election protection measures, the Times columnist David Leonhardt writes. “That may sound like bare-knuckle politics, but preserving democracy calls for toughness,” he says.

And the 11 states that don’t offer online voter registration should start, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, since the coronavirus may reduce access to government offices that do registration work and cause Postal Service disruptions. The center also recommends that the 39 states that already offer online registration update their systems.