one of my illiberal opinions is that i'm skeptical of mail-in voting. one of the reasons a secret ballot works so well is that buying votes is impossible, because you can't prove to anyone that you voted a certain way. 1/n

mail-in ballots are vulnerable to an attack where an anonymous malefactor tells you "show me a photo of your ballot filled out for trump and i'll send you 0.01 bitcoin" or whatever. 2/n

you could prevent this by allowing people to request a replacement ballot (so said malefactor can't be sure the photo they get is a ballot that got mailed), but then the request would just become "send me a video of you dropping your ballot in the mail". 3/n

you could run extensive and thorough government fishing expeditions combined with steep penalties (so nobody can be sure an anonymous malefactor isn't a government agent running a sting operation rather than an actual bitcoin merchant), but that seems like a lot of work. 4/n

i'm not aware of any evidence that this attack has taken place, but... it could. mail in voting should be used when needed, but the tried and true method of "go to a physical polling location, fill out a paper ballot, and drop it in a box" should remain the gold standard. n/n

re: "steep penalties", if we went with mass mail-in voting, i could be convinced that complying with a request to share a photo of your ballot in exchange for money should be a death penalty offense. throw violators into a volcano and invoke damnatio memoriae or whatever.