There is no doubt that absentee ballots can help keep people safe and expand voting access but the major drawback is it brings a greater chance of litigation.

There are more things that can go wrong with vote by mail compared with in precinct voting.

History shows that a major fight over an election's outcome is more likely to come in the form of challenges to absentee ballots.

When voters go to a neighborhood polling place they meet face-to-face with a poll worker who signs you in and then lets you cast a ballot that immediately joins the pool of ballots to be counted after the polls close.

Sign in signatures sometimes present a voting problem here but once the poll worker says you're qualified to vote you no longer can become unqualified or your ballot left uncounted.

Some in political circles want to stay away from the secret ballot and allow what some are saying will turn out to be nothing more than “ballot harvesting” whereby political activists visit people's homes, provide them with ballots, assist them in filling them out and deliver them to the Board of Elections…hereby what some are calling the biggest form of fraud in the political environment.

There are those in the political circle that reject any notion that voting by mail could result in fraudulent results but evidence to the contrary shows that four men in New Jersey were recently indicted for committing voter fraud related to mail-in ballots on multiple counts of ballot tampering and incorrect ballot handling.

In person voting appears to be the most reliable and effective way to vote particularly because mail-in voting can be vulnerable to fraud.

Ed Townsend provides year around "Beyond The News"coverage in this column with over 60-years of photojournalism analysis and insight. The column can also be read on his Web blog at http://bght.blogspot.com