It's not as if signatures are going to do that. Especially not any of the types of fraud that involve coercion or payment for votes. If you're paying someone for their vote they can still sign their name. One of the reasons it needs to be secret is to make it impossible for anyone to verify that you voted the way they want you to.

I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?

It's not any more problematic for the voters, yes, but what about the poll workers? They stay there all day and skew older. The big concern is that reliable poll workers are going to skip this year because of COVID (not unreasonable) and we simply won't have people to facilitate the voting we normally do. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/05/894331965/wanted-young-people...

Would it be that hard to put a sheet of clear plastic between the poll workers and the voters?

You can put all the protections in place you want but if volunteers don't feel safe, they won't show.

> I still don't understand how voting in person is supposed to be any more problematic than e.g. buying groceries in person. Wear a mask, stand six feet apart etc., what's the problem?

Grocery stores don't have checkout lines that are hours long where you are standing around near the same group of strangers for an extended time.

Worse, the states with the longest, slowest voting lines also tend to be the states with less stringent mask requirements, less diligent enforcement of the requirements they do have, and more people who ignore the requirements.

Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I'd like to know how I would go about committing fraud with my mail-in ballot. I only get one ballot, so I only get to vote once. I could try to steal someone else's and vote with it, but they might notice their lack of ballot and report it to the elections office. And if I voted and they voted, it would get flagged immediately and then the police would get involved. The penalties are pretty stiff considering how little value you'd think one little vote has. You need to figure out how to do it in quantity to offset that risk. Good luck.

Ballot harvesting. The party (or activists) can send people house to house collecting ballots. Two things can happen. The can get the person to sign a blank ballot which the harvester fills out, or the can simply thorw out ballots for the opposing political party.

A woman who thought she was allowed to vote (she was not, as she was a recently paroled felon) got sentenced to a five year prison sentence for it. Another woman voted illegally as a green card holder, sentenced to eight years.

So you are suggesting that the major political parties would sanction, even informally, having people go out to houses to illegally harvest ballots, or throw out ballots they don't agree with? To get one nearly worthless vote at a time, with a very possible multi-year prison sentence for each. That is utterly ridiculous.

It's not illegal in California. The major parties do send people out to harvest ballots. Nobody can tell what happens with the votes. Some people's votes are sure to be discarded. Some people hand over unfilled ballots, with or without signature.

There have been irregularities as a result.

If California allows unsigned ballots, then they have a legal problem to fix. Just because they do it wrong doesn't mean it cannot be done right.

I can't imagine many votes have been discarded, that sounds more like a conspiracy theory. It wouldn't take long to get caught, since voters can easily verify their own vote was recorded.