In November 2000, the New York Times’s Leslie Wayne warned about the expansion of absentee voting: “The alternatives to traditional voting are more susceptible to fraud.” Wayne attributed the concern to “experts” who said that “[a]bsentee ballots can be more easily sold or shown to others before they are cast.”
The New York Times NOW insists through its designated arbiter of verified facts that absentee voting is the “gold standard”; the opinion page denounces any concern about the practice as not just wrong, but a myth used to suppress voting by the poor and minorities. And yet for more than 20 years the Times has been making the not-unreasonable case that absentee ballots are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting.
One might ask whether the Times, in its eagerness to discredit arguments with which it now disagrees, has thrown decades of its own reporting under the bus. That’s effectively the question put to the Times, but not answered.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/14/for-years-the-new-york-times-reported-absentee-voting-boosts-fraud-until-donald-trump-agreed/
Absentee ballots have historically leaned Republican... until last year, where they were overwhelmingly Democrat.