Voting processes are to a large degree about balancing tradeoffs. The point of mail in voting is to decrease the friction of voting, i.e. you don't need to go to a polling place on a specific day.
Yes, in exchange for removing the guarantees of the secret ballot and a secure chain of custody for ballots. Which, at scale, is a disaster - and basically eradicates trust in elections.
The mass mail in voting thing was supposed to be due to a national health emergency, reasonable people were willing to temporarily reduce those guarantees in the name of public safety. How foolish of us! Now we can see the party in power has used it as a bait and switch to try to make these changes permanent. Why?
Other countries, such as the UK, have had postal voting for a long time. I've heard no evidence that there's systematic abuse.
What destroys trust is not postal voting. It's a losing party actively spreading disinformation in an attempt to discredit an election result they don't like.
The problem, as I stated, is not postal voting. It is mass postal voting. Typically mail in voting is opt-in. Relatively few ballots are printed, and the recipient is engaged to ensure the process completes safely. The blast radius of the vulnerabilities it creates are small, and the vulnerabilities themselves are much more narrow given the selective nature of it. This is a totally acceptable mechanism whereby a relative few individuals vote in the most secure possible method they can participate in, and it doesn’t compromise the entire system.
Now, in California, all mailboxes are flooded with blank ballots for all elections. It is insanity. The entire election process here has its integrity hinged upon a signature on an envelope. Which, by the way, is quickly separated from the ballot for counting, ensuring it is fundamentally impossible to do an audit. You’d have to be a fool to take seriously the idea close, highly contested elections in California are assured to be accurate results.
The primary goal of elections is to make the public feel confidence they have a fair representative government. In other words, if basic logic dictates that you shouldn’t trust the election system, you should expect large parts of the public will stop believing they live in a democracy and act as people always do in such situations.
Hmm, OK. That certainly is worse than opt-in postal voting, though I think it's possible you're overstating quite how bad (for example, assessing how you think other people might behave is never quite 'basic logic').
The logic is that elections which do not have any secret ballots, do not have any ballots which go through a secure chain of custody, and cannot be audited are fundamentally election systems that are being run on an honor system. And democracy, of course, is fundamentally about the idea that you offset the adversarial nature of government with an objective, non-honor system based mechanism called voting. Taken together, this is a disaster.
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