evidence: As the Jan. 6 committee held its second public hearing Monday, it focused much of its presentation not on the deadly Capitol attack or former President Donald Trump’s statements that allegedly stirred his supporters into violence, but on a more arcane subject: mail-in voting. The House panel presented evidence showing how Trump sowed the seeds for his efforts to overturn the election by waging a crusade against mail ballots. Despite expectations that the raging pandemic would depress in-person voter turnout in 2020, Trump rejected arguments from his own campaign staff to embrace voting by mail—choosing instead to discourage his supporters from voting absentee. [...] Yet Trump frequently castigated mail voting as rife with fraud. As states dramatically expanded access to that voting method during the pandemic, he successfully convinced many Republican voters to reject it: 59% of Democrats in 2020 voted by mail, whereas only 30% of Republicans did.