I think we need to rid ourselves of the mail in.
It's easy access to cheating for one thing. And moreover; see what happens when people are either clueless or do NOT give time to think of the consequences of choices.
In Indiana, where I live, there was a race one county over from me for city council. There were three Republican candidates going into the primary for three slots. No Democrats ran for the office. One of the candidates killed his wife and was in prison awaiting trial at the time of the primary vote. He got the least number of votes; but still 60 people voted for him. Even though he had eventually confessed to the murder, the law presumes innocence until the verdict. Without a guilty verdict, the Republican committee in that county could not remove him as a candidate. Luckily he dropped out of the race prior to the election, allowing the Republican committee to select a different candidate.
On the mail in, I too see the decrease in security. Interestingly, in Georgia, where new state election law SB202 made it harder for everybody to apply for mail in ballots, as happened in 2020 by decree of the Secretary of State, black voters prefer to vote in person at a higher percentage than white voters. After years of disenfranchisement through now illegal voting restrictions, they rightly see that when voting in person, you know your vote will be counted. There is no administrative sniff test on whether a ballot is valid.
The worst form of this decrease in security are states that mail out ballots to every voter registered. This is insane. It assumes that the voter rolls are up to date, when in actuality voter rolls are probably the least accurate residency record. Let me make some comparisons to prove the point. If someone has moved to a different state, they probably left a forwarding address with the post office. Yet they probably did not ask to be stricken from the voter rolls. So the automatic mail in ballot will be dutifully forwarded out of state to their new address. Likewise, all of the utility companies will know that the residence has changed ownership; but the voter rolls will likely not know. It requires a lot of effort on the part of county election offices to redo the voter rolls between elections. This usually occurs at a time when they are also gearing up for the next election, so they are busy getting ballots prepared, polling stations manned, mail in applications processed, etc.
Finally, I think all Americans should have confidence in three things in regards to election integrity. First, all registered voters should have an adequate and equal ability to vote. Second, all voters should be assured that all efforts will be made to count their vote within the restrictions placed on counting by the state election laws. So this would disallow votes that come from voters not properly registered or not allowed to vote because of court restrictions. It would disallow votes arriving by mail after the declared date. It would disallow mail in votes having sufficient errors in the ballot to constitute a major error. As you can see, this is a subjective measure and unless addressed specifically in the election law, can lead to lawsuits like what we saw in Pennsylvania on improperly dated mail-in envelopes. Third, all voters should have confidence that the system has not been corrupted by people voting when they shouldn't. I live close enough to Chicago to remember the satirical remark made about the Daly voting machine there, "Vote early and vote often."
