The 'first time'? You ill-informed asshole, for years Republicans and Dems have been using mail in votes at rough parity.
More Dems almost certainly used them during the pandemic rather than stand in line with a bunch of unmasked, mouth breathing, knuckle scraping, Trumpanzees.
restripe, If you are sincerely concerned about attempts to fix elections you can not ignore Republican efforts:
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun [...] For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167072165
If you are genuinely concerned, that is factual information.