Dear President Trump:

   I've been thinking about "vote by mail". I don't think we should be blanket opposed to it. There are lots of good reasons to make voting more convenient. Instead we should be focused on ensuring that only registered voters get to vote, that people can react to new information until election day, and that no variant of ballot stuffing can happen.

  What follows is what I think would be a good voting system.

  1) Give primacy to a physical presence vote. If a voter takes the trouble to physically show up and proudly vote at their assigned polling place, that vote should count. We should allow them to cast their vote, and that vote should override all their other votes.

  2) To make sure we don't allow duplicate votes, we use the current record of who physically voted. No mail in votes should be opened or counted before the end of voting day. We reject every mail-in envelope that comes from a voter who physically voted. If these envelopes are marked with the mailing date, we can reject all but the last one from each voter. Any envelope postmarked with a date later than 3 days before voting day, or received after voting day should also be rejected.

End Part 1...
... Part 2

  3) Ballot harvesting should be banned. Only the post office should be able to transport mail-in ballot envelopes. I would even allow them to provide a ballot envelope to a person with valid Voter ID wishing to change their vote, and associate the Voter ID with the envelope serial number in the registration database. The post office should charge $10 or so for the service. If anybody else is allowed to transport ballot envelopes, they should be someone who normally delivers other items as well for the voter.

  4) Ballot envelopes are only sent to registered voters, and have a serial number that is associated with the Voter ID in the registration database prior to being sent. If imprinted with the Voter ID, that portion shall be removable before the ballot is returned.

  5) States that want to allow provisional ballots at the polling place must normally treat them as mail ballots sent BEFORE any other mail ballots. A person with Voter ID showing up at a different polling place than their assigned one will have their provisional ballot counted as a mail ballot sent AFTER all other mail ballots.

  6) The serial numbers of all rejected ballots and reason for rejection should be recorded, and the ballots destroyed. We can then use the database to count attempted duplicate votes, illegal votes, and duplicate registrations.