Massachusetts would send each voter in the state a mail-in ballot for all 2020 elections, if a new bill before the state legislature is passed. The bill, which would also expand early voting, was one of multiple up for debate on Beacon Hill Thursday aimed at reducing the risk of coronavirus on election day.

Quentin Palfrey, chair of the group Voter Protection Corps, told Emily Rooney on WGBH News’ Greater Boston Thursday that these efforts should be part of a plan to protect against infection and access to voting.

“It’s important to combine those kinds of options with some of the traditional in-person options that we’ve had in the past,” he said. “We know that certain kinds of voters are particularly likely to use in-person voting options.”

President Donald Trump has condemned such proposals, alleging the potential for rampant fraud.

“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” the president said in a tweet last month.

But Palfrey, a Democrat who ran for lieutenant governor in 2018, said that existing vote-by-mail programs across the U.S. haven’t had those issues.

“What we’ve seen, actually, is that they’ve had a fairly high rate of voter turnout and no fraud to speak of,” he said. “Any time you’ve got a widespread system, there’s gonna be some abuse but what’s been shown in scholarship around the states that have adopted this — and some of those are red states as well, like Utah has had a very good experience with vote-by-mail — have shown that this has moved very smoothly.”

Palfrey argued that politics, and not fraud, was the president’s real concern.

“We have a president who has routinely weaponized lies about voter fraud in order to increase obstacles for voting in certain kinds of groups that historically don’t vote for Republicans,” he said. “What we’ve seen in red states and in blue states is that reforms that make it easier to vote work just to increase the vote.”

But arguing against such reforms in the time of coronavirus, could actually hurt the president politically, Palfrey said.

“In the time of this pandemic, I think a lot of the people who are going to have the hardest time voting are going to be senior citizens and that’s a group of people who have historically voted Republican in fairly high numbers,” he said. “It’s not at all clear to me there’s a partisan advantage here.”

“There is a huge democracy advantage though, we need to overcome these obstacles,” he added.