Public health experts have been encouraging local election officials to embrace a suite of safety measures at polling places for the November 3 election, according to an October 29, 2020 article in STAT.
Recommended measures to guard against the spread of the coronavirus include installing plexiglass shields between poll workers and voters, spacing voting booths far apart, keeping pens sanitized, and staging lines outside. With these and other steps, voting should be relatively safe, say experts.
“It seems to me like this would be similar to going grocery shopping or going into a restaurant and picking up a takeout order but having to wait for the order to come up,” Stephen Kissler, research fellow in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told STAT. “Both of these things are considered not zero risk, but relatively low risk in the spectrum of things that we can do with respect to Covid.”
Read the STAT article: Is it safe to lick the ballot envelope? Public health officials take on the new challenge of making voting safe amid a pandemic