Wuf, you're reaching. I happen to agree with you that the way people put democracy on a pedestal is naive, but you must know that removing voting options that can reliably be expected to lower voter turnout among a particular demographic is playing dirty. It could be that this demographic simply has a distrust of voting by mail. This distrust can be completely baseless-- but exploiting it by making absentee voting the only reasonable option and then claiming that it's not unfair because the remaining option requires less effort is disingenuous.

Whether any of the hypothetical scenario above is true-- I'm not particularly interested in going there. You can claim it's not, as you have, and that's fine, but you've argued that there is nothing wrong with the scenario itself.

If X reliably causes Y, and Y is bad, it is fairly unimportant what the function on X is. Things can be complicated, of course, for example, it can be said that the guarantee of free speech causes hate speech-- but in totality free speech causes much more and on balance the results of guaranteed free speech are net positive. But I don't see your putting forth the outsized benefits of taking actions to reduce the turnout among a specific group of voters.