Advocates for making voting safer and easier this year are showering Congress with appeals for help in the next coronavirus response package.
The flow of letters, e-mail and appeals posted online has accelerated in recent days, as lawmakers have started haggling over a fourth aid package since the pandemic took hold. But any decisions have now been delayed at least two weeks, as the Senate on Tuesday joined the House in postponing lawmakers' earliest return until the week of May 4.
The missives have much in common: They are signed mainly by progressive groups, augmented by a handful of cross-partisan good governance organizations. They focus on getting more money for expanding mail-in voting, early in-person voting, online registration and other steps to protect the electorate and election workers from the virus. And they stop short of calling for federal requirements for states spending the aid.
The most immediate decision for Congress is how to break a partisan stalemate over increasing funds to the Paycheck Protection Program, the small-business relief program at the core of the government's efforts to steer the economy beyond the worst of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Beyond that, Democrats have been pushing legislation mandating that states ease access to the ballot box this fall, principally by making absentee ballots available to all voters. Republicans object, arguing that would constitute a federal takeover of elections and spawn a wave of election fraud.
The groups are mainly soft-pedaling or staying away from that fight, especially now that President Trump's antagonism toward widespread voting-by-mail has hardened GOP opposition.
The award for the largest list of signatories clearly goes to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which had more than 200 groups on its letter sent Monday to all members of Congress. It asks for $4 billion in funds to help with delayed primary elections and the fall general election, on top of the $400 million provided in last month's $2.2 trillion stimulus package.
The letter highlights the need for more by-mail and early voting but also emphasizes the importance of providing safe Election Day options. It says states should not be required to provide matching funds — a 20 percent match on the first funds — and that some oversight should be included.
"We encourage Congress to institute accountability measures that provide latitude to states while ensuring that the funds are being directly used to ameliorate the impact of the pandemic on voting access," the groups wrote.
After the funding is delivered, the letter says, several policy changes "must be implemented" to ease the process of voting — including no-excuse absentee voting and online and same-day registration.
Among the more prominent groups who signed are the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club.
Another 50 groups sent an open letter to congressional leadership, also released Monday, demanding Congress provide $4 billion to the states. It calls for the money to be used for the same things mentioned by the Leadership Conference, and walks a similar fine line about mandates.
"While these reforms can and must be implemented by the states, Congress has an obligation to safeguard the integrity of our elections by setting national voting rights standards," says the letter. Stand Up America, Common Cause and Indivisible organized this letter, which includes some of the same groups as the first one.
On Tuesday representatives from a dozen different groups, many of which emphasize a more ideologically centrist approach to lobbying for fixes in the democratic system, signed a letter from the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers urging Congress "to move swiftly and decisively on voter mobility legislation" — but without mentioning either a monetary request or the need for mandates.
A similar letter to Capitol's Hill's bipartisan leadership was sent last week by the top leaders of the new Fix the System coalition, a group including some of the most influential democracy reform groups formed this spring to push proposals they view as having potential for bipartisan support.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.