No fu needed for me. You’re showing your age, amigo, if you think it wasn’t long ago. 
I’ve been voted by mail (without any reason) for over 25 years. Once you sign up, you automatically get a ballot in the mail.
In other words, you have neither the memory nor the Google-fu to report on the old requirements for voting absentee. Got it.
And, since it’s been more than 18 years since I set foot in California: No, 25 years wasn’t so very long ago. 
Since nobody else offered to use their Search skills, bad searcher septimus tried. It took almost two seconds to find
Since I walked a precinct for John Vasconcellos in 1966, but wasn’t political in the late 70’s (and spent much of the 80’s out of state), it’s no surprise that I remember absentee voting a bit different thatn you whippersnappers.
Bush was already leading by 537 votes before the absentee ballots arrived. The absentee ballots merely widened his lead.
Yes, in the 1950s.
Time is a place is in some 4th dimensional physics.
In my years of following politics I’ve never seen that happen. As far as I know, seeking to block certain groups from the polls by convoluted laws about what types of ID are allowed and that sort of thing is only done by Republicans, never by Democrats.
The favored type of abuse of power by Democrats against Republicans seems to be more old-fashioned: harassing and threatening them with bogus criminal charges and investigations. For example, in 2014 a Democratic District Attorney in Texas brought bogus charges against governor Rick Perry using an obviously nonsensical legal argument. The state Court of Appeals eventually threw the case out with prejudice, but only after Perry had been forced to spend millions of dollars and lots of time defending himself and it basically destroyed his 2016 Presidential campaign.
A much bigger case occurred in Wisconsin, where Democratic prosecutors launched an “investigation” into virtually every conservative activist group in the state. They found a judge willing to rubber-stamp search warrants without any evidence and sent police storming into activists’ homes in the middle of the night, seizing computers, phones, papers, and anything else that they felt like taking. Once again, courts ruled that it was an illegal and bogus action on the part of the prosecutors and the victims eventually won multiple lawsuits against various Democrats and government organizations involved.
There are other examples too.
Well, this fossilized talking point is correct. Conservative groups sued the IRS, they won, and the IRS lost and admitted wrongdoing. So it is in fact true that in the Obama administration, the IRS took illegal action against conservative groups.
That lawsuit, of course, should not be confused with the other lawsuit in which a conservative group sued the IRS for criminal conduct and won. The IRS is required to keep information private. Making it public is a felony. The IRS took the list for the National Organization for Marriage and gave it to their political opponents, most likely because Mitt Romney was on the list and they wanted to embarrass him during his presidential campaign.
Seems like an interesting subject for another thread: Do Republicans ever harass and threaten Democrats with bogus charges and investigations. I’m not sure why you brought that up in this thread.
If you were to start that thread, I bet we could come up with some examples.
Usually, you have to follow the links to determine that they don’t say what they’re purported to say. And with that, I go to my User CP.