Editorial: It's time to consider vote-by-mail

It is difficult to know today what the country might look like come November.

Will we still be under siege by the COVID-19 pandemic, or will it be largely under control?

Will life generally be back to normal, or will we still be operating as much as possible behind closed doors?

Will much of the population be out and about, but the at-risk population still be in isolation?

It's difficult to know today how dangerous it might be to go to the polls. What we all do know, whatever our political stripes, is that there will be an election on Nov. 3 and it will be important that it be held.

It's time to investigate what can be done to make voting as safe as possible and to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised by reasonable health concerns.

Could the answer be vote-by-mail?

It's certainly a solution worth exploring.

A lot of the country votes by mail already. Members of the military do so all of the time. Students away at college often do absentee voting. Even the President of the United States does.

In fact, according to one estimate, almost a quarter of all ballots in the last two national elections were cast by mail.

For some states, vote-by-mail is the standard procedure. This November, that will be the case in Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

There is no evidence states that have it suffer a significant amount of voter fraud. They do, however, tend to have pretty good voter turnout.

If the government can trust the mail for our income tax returns, it seems to us it should be able to find a way to trust it for voting.

Reliable procedures can be established to provide for the security of a vote-by-mail system.

When it comes to laws that regulate voting, so much of the debate tends to be skewed by party advantage. The Republican Party argues that liberal voting laws open the process up to fraud. The Democratic Party argues that requirements to show an ID amount to voter suppression.

But there is reasonableness both to opening up the process and to ensuring honest elections and common ground ought to be found.

Why not put together a bipartisan group of legislators to try to collaborate on a system that would be agreeable to both parties?

We need to protect our democracy.

And this year, that starts with protecting our electorate.