Donald Trump's supporters will largely vote-by-mail. They must be given this opportunity or he will claim the election was rigged and chaos will ensue.
The argument
Counterintuitively, a common argument for mail-in-voting is to help balance out the election in favor of Donald Trump. Proponents of vote-by-mail believe Donald Trump cannot win the 2020 election without mail-in voting, therefore it must be included in the electoral process or he will claim the election was rigged. One of the main reasons given for the inclusion of mail-in ballots is that due to the massive enthusiasm gap and health gap between Trump supporters (elderly white people) and Trump haters (young and active people), without mail-in ballots he stands no chance. Given Donald Trump’s constant preemptive delegitimization of the 2020 presidential election already, this camp of people thinks that without mail-in ballots by his GOP base, to soften the amount of votes by which he loses, it will be easier for him to claim the election was rigged.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The empirical premise turned out to be the reverse of what happened. Mail voting in 2020 was used far more heavily by Democratic than by Republican voters — a partisan gap that opened during the campaign and is generally attributed to the incumbent's own sustained attacks on the method, which discouraged his supporters from using it. The mechanism the argument describes, in which mail ballots rescue an older Republican base from a health-driven turnout deficit, did not operate; if anything the reverse did. The prediction about legitimacy also failed on its own terms. Mail ballots were included, turnout reached its highest level in over a century, and the election was nonetheless declared rigged — with the mail ballots themselves becoming the principal focus of the claim, in litigation, in recounts and in the events of the following January. Retaining the method did not purchase the acceptance the argument said it would buy; it supplied the material for the objection. The demographic characterisation is crude enough to matter. Describing the two coalitions as elderly white supporters against young and active opponents does not match the 2020 electorate, in which the incumbent gained ground among younger and non-white voters and his opponent's strongest cohorts included the oldest. Most fundamentally, the reasoning is of the wrong kind for the question. Whether a method of voting should be permitted turns on access, security and administrability — not on which candidate it is predicted to help. An argument that recommends keeping mail ballots because of their effect on one candidate's margin concedes the opposing side's framework and invites the mirror-image argument, which is precisely the argument the sibling position makes. Election rules chosen for their expected partisan consequences are the problem both positions claim to be solving.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The demographic premise did not hold: mail voting in 2020 was used far more heavily by Democratic than Republican voters, a gap attributed substantially to the incumbent's own attacks on the method, so the described mechanism did not operate. The characterisation of the two coalitions by age and health is also cruder than the 2020 electorate. [Rejecting P2] The prediction failed on its own terms — mail ballots were included and the election was declared rigged anyway, with those ballots as the focus. Arguing for a voting method by its predicted effect on one candidate's margin is also the wrong kind of reason, and invites the mirror-image argument; access, security and administrability are the criteria the question calls for.