I live in Oregon.  I have not been in a voting both since 1996 but I have voted in every election because we have vote by mail.  I will receive my ballot tomorrow or Monday.  That’s right, election day is three weeks long.  Both political parties initially opposed vote by mail because it makes last minute campaigning difficult.  But more people vote and so the Republicans still oppose it because those additional voters are primarily the poor and middle class who vote for Democrats more often than Republicans.  Via Daniel Larrison we have this typical attack on mail in voting from the right.

There are (at least) two basic threats to a voting system. One is that people will be allowed to vote when they’re not entitled to. This might be because they’re non-citizens, convicted felons, residents of another jurisdiction, have already voted, etc. Another threat is that a voter will be enticed or coerced into casting a vote that’s different from his or her true preference.

……

Rather, my point was about the effect of vote-by-mail schemes on voter secrecy. Imagine if an employer, who everyone knew to be a Republican, required his employees to request absentee ballots and show them to him before they were submitted. Think of an abusive husband who insists that he and his wife fill out their ballots together. Or imagine a political operative going around a low-income neighborhood paying people $50 if they let him fill out their ballots for them. This kind of corruption is very hard for voting officials to detect. And more insidious, voters themselves may not even realize that it’s unethical.

Now Mr Lee obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about or he’s just making stuff up because being from CATO he can.  In Oregon you place your ballot is an inner envelope that has no markings.  You place that envelope in the outer envelope which you sign.  That signature is checked against registration records and if it is OK the inner ballot is processed.  That takes care of the first paragraph but the second paragraph is really absurd.  Every scenario Mr Lee comes up with is a crime and  employers and political operatives are rarely if ever going to get away with.  The reality is here in Oregon there has not been a single case of voter fraud since Oregon became exclusively vote by mail.

Of course the real issue is the folks at the Koch brothers financed CATO institute realize that the less people who vote the more likely it is that a conservative will be elected.