Crazy, grace period is good. Can't control the mail speed. What if one party just delays the others mail.
It is a federal crime to interfere with the mail.
You can control whether you drop the ballot in the mail, in a dropbox, or at the polling place on or before election day.
The Constitution controls the basic rules of general elections.
A summary of the federal law stipulating when a federal election must be held follows:
Americans first began the custom of weekday voting in 1845, when Congress
passed a federal law designating the first Tuesday following the first Monday
in November as Election Day.
Before then, states were allowed to hold elections any time they pleased within
a 34-day period before the first Wednesday in December, but this system had a
few crucial flaws.
Knowing the early voting results could affect turnout and sway opinion in states
that held late elections, and those same last-minute voters could potentially decide
the outcome of the entire election. Faced with these issues, Congress created the
current Election Day in the hope of streamlining the voting process.
Election Day in the United States is the annual day for general elections of federal,
state, and/or local public officials. It is statutorily set by the U.S. government as "the
Tuesday next after the first Monday in November"[1] of even-numbered years, i.e.
the Tuesday that occurs within November 2 to November 8.
If your ballot is lost or delayed by the post office, that's on you.
STEP 1: Mail the ballot so it has sufficient time to reach the elections office a day or 2 prior to the election as a minimum.
STEP 2: Check the voter website for your state to see if your ballot was received.
STEP 3: if the voter website doesn't show the status of your mail-in ballot as received, then you have a choice. Either (a) hope the ballot makes it on time, or (b) go to a polling place and cast a provisional ballot. If the mail-in ballot meets the deadline, the provisional ballot is discarded.
If anyone is unscrupulous enough to delay the mail, it's not the Republicans.
One of the problems with mail-ins in swing states in 2020 is they immediately separated the outer envelope from the one containing the ballot. The issues there are many. if a ballot is postmarked after the deadline, and the worker decides to keep it because mail-ins tend to favor the democrats, there's no way to go back and audit how many of those mail-ins were received late.
One other problem was being unable to match a signature to a ballot since the outer envelope is normally where the voter signed. Once separated, the inner and outer envelopes can not be paired again.
If you can't follow the rules, you deserve to lose. Maybe instead of trying to "fix" the rule so ballots arriving late are counted, just do away with mail-ins for anyone and everyone without restrictions. Go back to the process of requesting a ballot if you won't be able to appear at a polling place by election day. I.E. military deployed.
There needs to be a one-size-fits-all rule, namely the ballot must arrive by the time the polls close on election day, or it can't be counted.