Bring the Masks and Sanitizer: The Surprising Bipartisan Consensus About Safety Measures for In-Person Voting During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Requiring masks at the polls might implicate a clashbetween two vital rights: the constitutional right to vote and theright to protect one’s health. Yet the debate during the 2020election over requirements to wear a mask at the polls obscuredone key fact: a majority of Americans supported a maskmandate for voting. That is the new insight we provide in thisEssay: when surveyed, Americans strongly supported safetymeasures for in-person voting, and that support was highregardless of partisanship. One implication of our results isthat by making some widely supported safety modifications,state election officials likely can increase, in a non-polarizingfashion, voters’ feelings of safety when going to their pollingplace, especially during a global health emergency.