Your principle of “Look before you leap” seems like an appeal to inductive reasoning or to some other basic notion of prudence that contrasts only with sheer insanity.

That's a remarkably reductive reading at this stage of the game. Years ago, a friend told me that a "conservative' is someone who believes one thing leads to another. You can contrast that to insanity if you wish, but liberals routinely dismiss second-order effects as "mere speculation," as you did with my mail-in voting opinion. Looking before you leap means fearing vote harvesting. It's not insane not to fear it - you don't fear it, and you're not insane, are you? But I think "look before you leap" captures my fear, so it's clearly not simply an appeal to sanity.

You should give serious thought to not trying to tell me what I think or mean. I've been writing precisely for over fifty years. The occasional brain-fart happens, but mostly, I mean what I say and not some generalized version of it.