Voting alone

Conversations with nearly a dozen thinkers from the worlds of political science, political psychology, technology, organizing and campaigning suggest that we are ill-designed for the pandemic election. The internet, many said, is centrifugal, driving people away from each other and toward only close friends, immediate family and themselves — the opposite of the centripetal force that elections and their aftermaths demand, and that physical interactions often provide.

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Yet these thinkers have not abandoned all hope. Like the pandemic itself, the next several weeks, they said, will constitute an acid test for a frightened and divided country.

“The virus turns on this,” said Mr. Putnam. “Are we a we, or are we an I?”

Decades of political science research instruct that whether and how the people closest to you vote plays a huge role in your own decisions.

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