Tuesday Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) told “Just the News,” she was attempting to included making election day a federal holiday in the next coronavirus stimulus package.
Gillibrand said, “We want every tool available for elections because we don’t know where COVID is going to be at that stage. Certainly, vulnerable people won’t want to be voting in-person. So we want to make sure there’s a vote by mail component in all states. Typically states do have absentee ballots no matter what. So they have the infrastructure to do it. We just need it ramped up.”
She continued, “We want things like curbside voting to be available. We’ve used that in some states for seniors, for the disability community. We want to make sure that’s up and running. We want to make sure Election Day is a day off, and we want to make sure people can vote early because that’s another way, if COVID is still very much an issue. If you could vote for two weeks before the election, any day you want, you could spread out the number of voters who have to go to the voting site. We want to activate all the flexibility in voting, so we have lots of solutions depending on where we are.”
She added, “So I have a package of legislative reforms that I wrote with John Lewis that I introduce every year. That was passed by the House as part of HR1. In the Senate, we’ve taken the bill apart and done piece by piece. So there are several pieces of that bill that we are actively going to try and get in COVID 4, and making election day a holiday is one of them.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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