Also cheating with paper ballots is much harder to scale and remain undetected than cheating by altering records in a database.

I agree with your point that attempts at cheating are inevitable, the rest is confusing though:

We have a long and storied history of coming up with extremely disturbing capitol punishments performed in public, and yet those punishments coexisted with much higher rates of criminality then now.

Stealing from the church in history carried some pretty gruesome deaths, and yet plenty of people still stole from the church, etc.

People are chronically bad at transferring future risk to their current decision making. Any consequence that relies on people being able to model a future problem against their current desires/needs is always going to have a lot of transmission losses. You end up trying to make ever more horrible punishments to overcome the losses in transmission.

I think the goal should be the smallest possible functioning consequence, which is possible by being close to the 'crime'. The very best way is when community can do it immediately. Like if someone does something fucked up, but then their buddies go 'that was fucked up dude', I am very confident this will prevent then from doing it again much more efficiently then a distant jail sentence. (among all the other ways too, there's never one clean action to take to solve problems on a societal level)

It's completely normal here. People get federally mandated time off to go vote; 3 hours IIRC, which is way more than would ever ordinarily be necessary (and polling stations are open well past typical work hours). I typically walk a few minutes from home, and never experience a significant lineup.

Relying on the postal service here would make it much worse, honestly.

Depends on what qualifies as an ID and how hard it is to get one. But unless you're actively providing them to people that need them with no extra work or travel on their part then you're going to be discriminating against people with less money or time.

In the case where disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race then it can be seen as racist (as it affects the population of that race differently). If the reason that disproportionately more poor people are of a certain race is because of racism, then a policy that disenfranchised the poor would effectively extend economic discrimination into political discrimination.

Though I tend to think that even if we remove the economic effects of racism such that disenfranchising the poor couldn't be called racist, they would still be classist and should be avoided where possible.

It's been a talking point specific to the voting system in the US, strangely no other country seems to think it's an issue and as soon as the topic changes no one in the US has an issue requiring IDs for things.