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Notes -
Can someone steelman mass mail-in voting for me? I racked up reports and a mild mod wrist slap over the weekend for referring to Nevada system as a "fucking stupid way to run an election" without further elaboration. In retrospect, I agree with the reports and with @cjet79 for the callout on it - it's an admittedly low effort swipe and I didn't do anything meaningful to justify it. Nonetheless, I really do think that this is an incredibly stupid way to run elections and I genuinely forget that other people apparently think it's basically fine. The reasons that it seems obviously stupid to me keep popping up in this election. A few of them:
Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.
Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.
Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.
Mail-in eliminates the near guarantee of a one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is ensured by in-person identification.
Maybe I'm wrong about these being big problems, but what exactly are we getting in return that makes it so valuable? I can see the case when it comes to military ballots and people who genuinely can't leave their homes, but why create these sorts of potential problems for people that can just head over to their local poll place? I have some criticisms of early voting, but it still seems substantially more secure than spamming ballots out to the last known address of every registered voter. I know I'm still being fairly snarky, but I'm also trying to actually understand why anyone thinks it's important to do elections this way.
The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.
Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.
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