[August]

The way the Dems are using mail in early voting is not by creating fictitious voters, although I'm sure some of that goes on like the infamous Dem tactic of getting the dead to vote.

What I believe really makes a difference is vote harvesting.

It's been noted in many previous elections that apparent enthusiasm on the campaign trail doesn't always equal a voter actually showing up at the polls on election day to cast a vote for the chosen candidate. Younger voters are especially prone to this, being easily distracted and undisciplined enough to just blow off all that work that used to be required to actually go and vote ("standing in line with squares, what a drag man"). Others are too busy or too drunk or too stoned, too crazy, or just plain too lazy to put in all that time and effort. It's a sizable percentage.

Mail in voting on the other hand eliminates all of that and allows all those lost votes to be harvested with complete efficiency.

The way vote harvesting works is the party sends out an army of operatives armed with ballots or ballot applications depending on the state. They canvas areas that they control, in the Dems case urban areas, college campus', community centers, homeless shelters, drug rehabs, housing projects, just about anywhere they can get signatures, maybe even from people who don't know or care what they are being asked to do.

Basically their targets just need to supply a name, an address (whether or not they actually live there) and a signature, which in most dem states cannot by law be validated, and the operative takes care of the rest, making sure that all of the ballots he's collected get dropped off at the polls or, in dem states, at unattended ballot drop off points in the dead of night.

"Handling the paperwork" like that is of course illegal but also extremely difficult to prove and even more difficult to prevent those ill gotten votes once submitted from being counted in the election. You might be able to identify some number of invalid ballots after the fact but since voting is secret you cannot say how many voted for one candidate or the other therefore they cannot be deducted from the vote totals.

Harvesting can and I believe has been enough to tip recent elections in certain states. Pennsylvania and Illinois most likely. The only possible response, short of somehow returning most voting to in-person vote on a paper ballot cast at a monitored polling place, is for the Repubes to play the same harvesting game as well or better than the Dems are doing. Now there are a lot more GoP early voters this cycle than before so maybe they are finally waking up but I'm not so sure it isn't just a case of getting voters who would have shown up at the polls on election day anyways to do it early or by mail. Plus one, minus one does not equal two.