What Went Down In The Arizona, Florida And Illinois Primaries

To add to Perry’s argument, voting by mail is logistically complicated and expensive, and it can be hard for a state with no experience to switch to it on such short notice as the coronavirus is requiring. You actually just saw this in Maryland, where a special congressional election on April 28 will move to entirely vote-by-mail, but there was not the manpower to conduct a statewide presidential primary entirely by mail, so the governor was forced to delay that election until June 2.

It seems dangerous to have in-person voting with the current COVID-19 situation — hence Ohio’s decision to postpone its election day. One potential solution would be expanding vote-by-mail and pushing back some of these primaries in March so states can set up vote-by-mail systems. That would likely be hard to implement but not impossible.

But I’m skeptical that widespread vote by mail or delaying primaries will happen for a few reasons.

On the GOP side, broad-based vote-by-mail tends to increase the number of people who vote, and we have a lot of evidence that the Republican Party is wary of increasing the size of the electorate. So I doubt there will be a lot of enthusiasm on the conservative side to allow more mail voting now, because that will create a precedent and a system they likely would not want to continue outside of this crisis.

Meanwhile, some center-left, establishment Democrats — now that one of their preferred candidates (Biden) is ahead — view extending the primary season much longer to be at best a waste of time and at worst something that helps Trump. So I think that’s why an effort to rethink today’s primaries was not really a consideration for the Democratic Party.