The mentally weak authoritarian hates (which is really fears) voting by mail because it's democratic - because that particular voting mechanism loosens the physical and psychological control surrounding the act of voting, opening it up to more citizens. The polling place is a bounded space. It has a time, a location, an atmosphere, officials, observers, procedures, and bad lighting - You arrive, perform the ritual, and leave, and we've talked about how claims of voter fraud are dog whistle for voter suppression, part of that suppression is making it harder to do even that basic process.
Voting by mail moves the political act out of that controlled theater and into a more open sphere. You can fill it out when you aren't exhausted from work in late stage de-regulated capital mixed with late stage empire, when you aren't worried about the time it's gonna take, transportation, or childcare. Mail voting actually gives democratic society something authoritarianism hates and thus fears: options via more time. It takes time to be part of the democratic process. It takes us at least a full day, if not a couple days to look into and research every candidate on a local or national ballot. And it should take you that much time as well. Then we need space to participate without having to rearrange our entire life that week or month around the machinery of one single Election Day. Which matters enormously.
Because freedom reducing authoritarian politics thrives on friction, intimidation, spectacle, and the cultivation of obedience. Freedom increasing Democratic politics does the opposite: it works to make participation easy and ordinary. A mailed ballot says, in effect: To participate in this particular civic ritual the state can bring the ritual to you. That is a subversive idea.
Imperial authoritarian brain rot cults frequently become preoccupied with controlling the definition of the legitimate voter through falsehoods such as non-citizens or dead people voting to anywhere near an outcome determinative degree. Making it about... who belongs? Who is “really” American? Who is sufficiently indoctrinated? Who is suspicious? Who should have to prove themselves? Once that mentality takes hold, anything that expands participation can become psychologically threatening because the authoritarian imagination tends to equate political legitimacy with the victory of its own idiocracy tribe of minds of low info and dis-info voters and or people dumber than cattle who have 6 teeth and defend those who own 6 yachts.
The authoritarian doesn't merely ask, “Are these ballots secure?” That is a perfectly legitimate question, and every voting system should be scrutinized for security. The more revealing question is whether the concern is consistently applied. If someone demands rigorous evidence concerning mailed ballots but accepts equally weak evidence when it supports their preferred candidate, we're no longer dealing primarily with election security. We're dealing with motivated reasoning.
When political cults systematically portrays expanded voting access as inherently suspicious, while simultaneously cultivating distrust in elections whenever it loses, very close attention should be given. Because then the question isn't really, “How should ballots be transported?” The question becomes: “Who gets to participate, under what conditions, and who gets to define which citizens count?” And that is the ancient question underneath the entire democratic experiment. An authoritarian political cult which can't stand that experience sees the citizen as a spectator who receives instructions from their overlords, identifies with a tribe, experiences outrage, and performs allegiance. Democracy requires something much stranger: not only a citizen who thinks, but one who is active in the process - and a little is better than none.