Push and pull.
With absentee, you “pull”. That is, you proactively ASK FOR a ballot and they send you one and you can’t vote in person.
With mail ballots, it’s “push”. That is, they send one to every voter, even if you may have moved or be dead. And it gets sent back, with no confirmation that it’s you. It is ripe for fraud. You could literally “steal” a bunch of mail ballots, fill them out, send them in, and nobody really knows who voted.
At lest with absentee, the thief has to suspect you are expecting a ballot to even steal it from your mail. The whole vote by mail thing is utterly preposterous.
I bought a house in 2016 which had formerly been chopped into two apartments. I still regularly get first class mail for...I think I’ve counted nine people who haven’t lived here for years.
This year the federal government itself sent me two sets of census questionnaires—one to the upstairs apartment address which hasn’t existed for years. The federal postal service delivered federal documents from a federal agency to imaginary people at a nonexistent address—with a warning that failing to fill them out could result in a federal penalty. I marked the extra set with RETURN TO SENDER—NO SUCH ADDRESS and mailed them back. They sent another one a few weeks later.
We have a squeaky clean county government here. Everyone trusts them to run a clean, honest election. There’s gonna be hell to pay if the feds try to meddle in this.