The 2020 presidential election shattered voter turnout records, with about two-thirds of eligible Americans casting a ballot. It was the highest voter turnout rate in a century and the largest increase in voters between two presidential elections.
High turnout amid a deadly pandemic wasn't a foregone conclusion and didn't happen by accident. It happened because many states, including Vermont, temporarily expanded voting by mail and early voting options to protect citizens' right to vote and their health. These changes proved immensely popular nationwide among voters, with nearly 70 percent casting their ballots either by mail (43 percent) or in person before Election Day (26 percent) — a dramatic increase over 2016.
This marks resounding success for democratic participation. If states didn't realize it before, they should now be sure that giving people more ways and opportunities to vote is a good idea in any election, and many of the temporary policies put in place during the pandemic to expand voting options should be made permanent.
Vermont officially learned that lesson Monday. Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed a sweeping vote-by-mail bill into law, ensuring that for every general election starting in 2022, every eligible Vermont voter will be sent a ballot, just as they were in 2020. Another important feature of the bill is that it sets up a "ballot curing" system. If an election official flags a potential issue with a particular ballot, such as a missing signature, the voter will have the opportunity to fix — or "cure" — the issue so that their vote is counted.
The people of Vermont demanded this change after seeing the system succeed in 2020. A RepresentUs poll showed that nearly 70 percent of Vermonters supported making the vote-by-mail policy permanent after the 2020 election, and more than 90 percent agreed that voting should be made as easy as possible. The bill garnered the support of Democrats, Republicans, Progressives and Independents in the General Assembly — a truly multipartisan victory.
With its new law, Vermont now joins Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington as states that send all registered voters a ballot for general elections, and plants itself firmly as one of the most voter-friendly states in the country.
All states should follow Vermont's lead and take steps to move toward a robust vote-by-mail system. While the numbers vary slightly from state to state, vote-by-mail significantly increases turnout, and voters consistently like it. Colorado's vote-by-mail policy, for example, boosted turnout by over 9 percent. In addition to increasing overall turnout, giving everyone the option to vote by mail reduces the participation gap between voters of color and white voters.
But instead of embracing vote by mail after 2020, many states have chosen to go in the opposite direction. Georgia, Florida, Iowa and other states have passed laws restricting access to the ballot box, including limiting vote by mail, decreasing the number of dropboxes and curtailing early voting. In total, legislators in 47 states have introduced 361 bills that include restrictive voting measures.
These restrictions represent an existential threat to democracy, and are solutions in search of a problem. Concerns about "voter fraud" and "election integrity" are often used to justify these anti-voter policies, despite the fact that fraud has been and continues to be vanishingly rare to the point of being functionally nonexistent. And each and every day, it becomes clearer and clearer that those pushing for these laws are using the "Big Lie" narrative to further their own political power.
It can't be said enough: Vote by mail is a tried and true policy — already in place in both red and blue states — that increases turnout and is popular among voters of all political parties.
The Covid-19 pandemic upended our lives in many ways, including the way we vote. We can't afford to miss this opportunity to learn from the 2020 election and implement or make permanent laws that made our democracy stronger. At the moment, too many states are learning the wrong lesson. Let's follow Vermont's lead by passing pro-voter laws in other states, and fight back against bills that hurt American democracy.
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.