A recurring theme as we live our lives in modern America is the old saying, “the generals are always fighting the last war.”

In elections, the application of the saying is to design a campaign to redress the special types of defeats we suffered last time.

It’s all over the media these days: “Bank your votes early!  Take advantage of the early vote!  As long as the polls are open for a month before Election Day, take advantage of it and make sure your vote counts!”

This conclusion is based on the theory that the reason Republicans lost in 2020 was that too many Trump-supporters put off voting until Election Day, and then somehow forgot to vote.  If they had voted early, the opportunity would not have been missed.

But we should question this theory.

Sure, voting early is infinitely preferable to not voting at all.  No doubt about it.  But voting on Election Day itself is infinitely preferable to voting early.

A wise campaign would therefore be encouraging its less motivated voters to vote early, but should actually encourage its definite voters — the ones who have never missed an election and never will — to vote on Election Day itself.

There are plenty of reasons for this, the first of which dates back a century or more — probably much more.  In big cities with functioning political machines, the precinct captain’s job has always been to monitor who voted throughout the day, so he could call “his” voters at home or at work and offer to take them to the polls before it was too late. 

The more corrupt the city, the more likely those party operatives would also use available names to cast ballots on their behalf during the lulls.  As Election Day stretched into Election Month in recent years, such partisan crooks have just been given twenty, thirty, or even more days in which to use this information to fabricate additional ballots.

Voter rolls include the names of people who never vote, along with people who are non-citizens and know they aren’t allowed to vote, in addition to the people who only occasionally or rarely cast a ballot of their own volition and might be susceptible to encouragement.

And thanks to the automatic voter registration resulting from the issuance of drivers’ licenses, the voter rolls include people who can’t, don’t, or won’t actually participate in the election at all.  But as long as they are on the rolls anyway, these names are handy vehicles for the fraud universally known to be practiced by corrupt machines.

And those aren’t the only reasons inactive names are on the voting rolls.  There are people who have moved away, people who have died, people who became felons and lost their right to vote, and people who have both a summer home and a winter home, legally able to vote only from one, leaving the other registration sitting there doing nothing, ready to be picked up and activated illegally by someone else.

Before we assume that such issues are a statistical nuisance, a drop in the bucket not worth our time, consider three statistics.

First, about 3.5 million Americans die every year.  That’s 3.5 million names that might have been valid the year before but are no longer.  Just considering the normal attrition of the natural life cycle of a population, that means that over ten years’ time, 35 million registrations that were once valid become invalid, unless there is a continuing effort to purge those names.

Second, hardly anyone lives in the same house or apartment all his life.  Most of us move on our own at least a few times, leaving our formerly valid voter registrations to become legally invalid — while remaining on the rolls — upon our departure.

Did you go to college, or did your children?  If they changed dorms or apartments each year in college, they might have registered each year (unless they voted from home).  That’s several more addresses per student, while of voting age, even before adulthood in dorms and off-campus apartments.  How many of these are purged from the rolls?

At any given time, there are about ten million students living at college.  They don’t all register to vote, but for those who do, every year, the number of voter registrations without a real resident behind them increases.

Third, consider the level of immigration — both legal and illegal — in the United States.  About 675,000 visas are issued each year for legal immigration, but as we all know, there have been hundreds of thousands more, all illegal, crossing the border each year for decades.  Under the Biden-Harris regime, that rate has swollen to millions per year.  The legal immigrants can’t legally vote until they become citizens, and the illegal immigrants can never legally vote.  But this isn’t enforced when most people are registered, especially through those automated registration methods.  Immigration — both legal and gate-crashing — therefore causes enormous padding of the voter rolls as well.

Add just these three sources together — and there are many more than these — and you see the potential for our voting rolls to become chock-full of individual registrations that cannot legally be used, but often are used nevertheless.

For this reason, political machines have two ways of using the voting rolls.  They know which names are “real and currently usable,” and they can nag those folks to show up and vote.  But they also know which names are not real, which names either never were legal or were once but are no longer.

The more of these there are, the more a sophisticated political machine can make the most of them.  And the more time they have to do it, the easier it becomes to take advantage of every opportunity.

Let’s imagine a fully staffed polling place on Election Day, with two or three Democrat poll workers and two or three real Republican poll workers.  If the majority vote was on Election Day proper, then the Republicans would notice if there were three hundred more votes than they remember seeing walk in throughout the day.

But now that we have a 30-day election period in so many states, there’s no way the honest poll workers can be suspicious if the pre-election ballot envelope holds hundreds more.  So they can’t raise an objection; they almost have to accept them.

This, more than anything else, is why the Democrats want long election seasons and push for the concept of “banking your votes early.”  They get to spread out the fraud over a month or more so it’s less noticeable, and if Republicans vote early, too, that gives them a constantly updated target so they can always estimate how many votes they need to fabricate by the end.

Do Republicans really want to help them in that quest?

If we really want to “learn from the last war,” perhaps we should try this: instead of trying to beat the Democrats at their own game — which Republicans can never do, because Democrats will always cheat — maybe we should work harder at making the system fraud-proof.  Instead of trying to get Republicans to vote early, we might try taking away the tools the Democrats use to rig the system.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker.  A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  Read his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his brand new nonfiction book on the 2024 election, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available on Amazon.

Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.