The more steps you add between a voter and a ballot box, the more opportunities you create for mistakes, disputes, and distrust.
Mail-in voting was a reasonable emergency measure during COVID. Making it the default forever is not.
If elections are important enough to determine who governs 330 million people, they're important enough to show up for in person.
Voting is the most important civic act in a democracy, yet we've normalized a system where ballots are mass mailed (in CA they're mailed whether you want one or not), sit unattended in mailboxes, get collected by third parties, arrive days or weeks later, and create endless disputes over signatures, chain of custody, and ballot curing.
Keep absentee ballots for the military, disabled, elderly, and people who genuinely cannot make it to the polls. Everyone else can vote in person, and nearly all states give you nearly two weeks to vote early in-person. The easier it is to verify a vote, the harder it is to question an election.
...That should be the goal.