Hi, I’m an MIT PhD student studying election security. Mail in ballots are a secure way to vote.

Here’s the thing: there’s a well-studied phenomenon in voting called the “blue shift” — mail in ballots tend toward democratic candidates. Hence the attack on absentee ballots happening here. See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2353352 and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3547734

Please, go vote! Seriously. It’s the only way democracy wins.

Of course there’s nuance — voters need to carefully fill out their ballots and we should be prepared for a prolonged tallying process. Make a plan, and follow the ballot tracker if your jurisdiction has it.

A great resource is the National Academies study on Securing the Vote. It's a free PDF, if you can fight through the odd page layout: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy

And yes, there’s a lot to do here to improve election integrity. Mail in balloting does have trade offs not seen with in-person polling, and we should be doing a better job studying and perfecting these systems. But the “mail in fraud” argument is still baseless.