Democrats controlled the house continuously for 40 years until 1994, due in no small part to gerrymandering. Republican-advantage gerrymandering (on a nationwide basis) dates to only about 2010.

> Democrats controlled the house continuously for 40 years until 1994,

1955-1995, actually, and yet it is still true that the current Republican effort (which also includes gerrymandering, but also all the other factors list by GP) has been in place for decades. (1995 was two and a half decades ago, and the Republican strategy being discussed started before they took control of the House.)

And, yes, some of the other bits besides gerrymandering also used to be Democratic strategies, especially racially-targeted restrictions on voting rights before the parties switched sides on race issues in a process that included Johnson's embrace of civil rights followed by the Republican subsequent exploitation of that and pursuit of disaffected ex-Democratic racists as a core voting bloc.

Either way, this last minute effort to expand mail in voting may not be fraudulent, but it's way too easy to allege fraud, and results will simply take too long to be tallied for anyone to actually trust the election.

The legitimacy of an institution is oftentimes equally backed by the perceptions of trust and respect of that institution as much as it is backed by the actual functionality of that institution.

Regardless of who you back or how much you trust the authenticity of vote by mail, too many people do not trust the other side to not cheat. And even if you assume we live in a world where voter fraud isn't possible for vote by mail, the veracity of the election can be attacked with little effort.

Imagine we're two or three weeks into November and still counting votes. A rogue actor prints tens of thousands of fake ballots. They don't need to actually count them, they just nee to make it public- "hey we found a bunch of lost (party of your choice) ballots!". That's what's scary to me. Suddenly, no one has faith that the other side didn't cheat. If I were Xi(China)- this is exactly what I'd be doing right now. It'd be laughably easy for a foreign state actor to absolutely destroy our faith in the election process right now.

Maybe the quote lost some context but talking about “...levels of voting...” being a negative thing seems like a pretty obvious admission of a desire to suppress votes.

No, they don't deserve the legitimacy of being engaged with as if what's going on isn't criminal or corrupt. It is, and those are the facts on the ground.