When I was applying for the ballot previously, the mail system was incredibly slow. I lived in Rhode Island at the time. You could send something from Toronto to Rhode Island and it might arrive in a day, it might arrive in a week, it might arrive in three weeks. It was unpredictable.
In the act of registering to vote, I worry about the efficacy of the mail system and about relying upon it not only for registration but for ballots. It concerns me greatly that you have a narrow time window within which to mail documents back and forth, perhaps in various iterations.
Say there's an error with the document. Say I send in a bank statement or a tax statement proving my residence and they say, “That one is not valid. There's a missing paper. We need to start from scratch.” I go through another reiteration, but perhaps between point A and election day it's still lost in the mail. An outside contingency—and this would be an outlier—is what happens if there's a mail strike somewhere in between.
When we rely upon this method and give it such a narrow window, we're setting the stage for a lot of people to be inadvertently excluded just by the slowness of the process.