To quote from the first article:
no clear-cut evidence of digital sabotage has emerged, much less a Russian role in it.
For the second I invoke Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." And quote:
The New York Times reporters acknowledge that it is uncertain whether the problems were caused by Kremlin-directed hacking or a more innocuous mishap like software malfunctions or human error
The second article seems to be a rehash of the NYT article, it doesn't seem to me to add anything significant.
As for your question: you can vote using any method and be reasonably sure that your vote will be counted. There is no evidence of widespread malpractice. As the articles note, there is nothing substantial that suggests that problems that voting machines had were caused by Russian "hackers". And so there is no reason to believe that that voting by absentee ballot is in any way "safer".
To illustrate by analogy, you could have asked "I heard a woman got attacked by a monkey at walmart. Will I be safer if I shop at Kroger?"