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Next month, thousands of Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama can begin voting by mail on whether they want to join a union, a major step for organized labor seeking to break into the giant online retailer.

The National Labor Relations Board said in a ruling on Friday that the ballots would be mailed out to eligible workers in the company’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala. on Feb. 8 and must be returned to the federal agency on March 29. The votes will be tallied the next day.

The voting will be the first large union election at Amazon, which has successfully rebuffed organizing efforts at some of its other facilities. In 2014, a small number of technicians at an Amazon warehouse voted against unionizing.

But the vote in Alabama covers the vast majority of the 6,200 workers, including seasonal employees, in the sprawling fulfillment center outside Birmingham.

In legal briefings, lawyers for Amazon tried to convince the N.L.R.B. that the voting should take place in person at the facility in Bessemer, despite virus infection rates in the surrounding community at 17 percent.

Amazon, according the labor relations board, offered to rent out an entire floor of a local hotel and provide transportation for the federal election monitors to help isolate them from the general public in Bessemer.

The company offered to provide digital devices called Distance Assistants or a “human social distancing team” to monitor the workers queuing up to cast their ballots.

But the labor board said for federal employees to use Amazon’s “extensive resources” during the election could create the appearance that the agency was “no longer a neutral party.” The N.L.R.B. also declined to use the social distancing team, saying it could “give the impression of surveillance or tracking.”

A congresswoman is sending letters to businesses asking for assistance in preventing the “ongoing and extreme threat of further violent attacks” in Washington and across the country in the lead up to the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Jan. 20.

The letters, sent by Representative Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, asked businesses such as hotels and car rental companies to retain all information related to bookings and service requests from Jan. 1 to Jan. 31, for potential use in “future law enforcement or congressional investigations.”

Ms. Maloney also asked the businesses to put in place screening measures to prevent their…