More than 50 progressive organizations signed an open letter Monday calling on Congress to appropriate $4 billion to states to boost mail-in voting efforts in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
The groups \u2014 which were led by Stand Up America and included Greenpeace USA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club \u2014 strongly urged the leaders of the House and Senate to immediately pass legislation that included funds for states to allow elections to go forward this year.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongress has an obligation to safeguard the integrity of our elections by setting national voting rights standards and providing state officials with urgent financial support so that they can institute these common-sense reforms while there is still time,\u201d\u00a0the groups\u00a0<\/a>wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n They\u00a0said Congress\u00a0should give states funding to go toward giving every voter the option to vote-by-mail, extending in-person early voting, expanding registration and educating voters about their voting options.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of us know how long this pandemic will last,\u201d the groups emphasized. \u201cFailing to provide states with this necessary funding puts the November elections and the rights of every voter at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n Some funds already given to states:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>The coronavirus stimulus package signed into law by\u00a0President Trump\u00a0last month included\u00a0$400\u00a0million<\/a>\u00a0to help states<\/a>\u00a0put on elections this year during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n The legislation did not include any specific mandates for how states could spend the money, and required states to match the funds by 20 percent, an issue some state officials have said could be difficult to accomplish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More than 50 progressive organizations signed...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23636,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23635\/revisions\/23636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}