One of the classic parables, dating back hundreds of years (maybe even thousands?) concerns the story of a messenger, sent with instructions for the commander at a battlefield.
The message never arrived, because the messenger’s horse lost his horseshoe along the way and went lame; without those critical instructions, the battle went wrong – the decisive battle – thereby losing the war.
Hence the saying:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the rider was lost.
For want of a rider, the message was lost.
For want of a message, the battle was lost.
And for want of a battle, the war was lost.
Throughout the course of your life, you will hear people minimize the importance of small things, in an effort to get you to look the other way, and accept the belief that one issue doesn’t matter because it seems so small – all the while counting on that one little thing to defeat you.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in election law.
The state of Georgia quietly made the news last month, when they acknowledged that they should not have counted all of their 315,000 early ballots from November 2020, because they didn’t have a pollworker’s initial on them, or because the total charts submitted were missing the pollworker’s initial.
Much like the rider and his horse, the pollworker’s initial serves as the nail that affixes a horseshoe. Without that initial on the ballot or on the precinct tally, there is no valid vote to count.
The Left wants us to believe that this is a minor technicality. In fact, it’s anything but.
For every election in America, there are hundreds of millions of ballots printed and distributed. Hundreds of millions of pieces of paper – a certain stock, a certain ink, a certain format.
These pre-printed ballots are split between city and county headquarters and the local precinct polling places, in pads or reams, weeks in advance of election day, before anyone knows how many actual voters there are going to be.
The difference between a light turnout election and a heavy turnout election could be a difference between twenty or thirty percent and between fifty or sixty percent. Some local elections, in fact, draw only ten or fifteen percent turnout, while hotly contested national elections can hit seventy or eighty percent of registered voters.
That’s a huge range. Election officials can’t risk printing too few ballots, so they have to print a surplus. They print way more ballots than they’re going to need, and then they distribute them – then they hope and pray they’ve provided enough.
On election day (or sadly, nowadays, throughout election month), voters check in with the pollworkers, identify themselves as being eligible to vote in that specific jurisdiction (that town, that district, that state), and the pollworker initials a single ballot to hand to that single voter. The voter can vote that ballot – and only that one. If it’s spoiled for any reason, the voter turns it in for a replacement, and there’s a formal procedure for the pollworkers to register it as void before initialing a replacement to hand the voter, and start over.
Every voter gets one ballot, no more; every polling place must keep careful track of both used and unused ballots, to be certain of how many legitimate votes may be counted that day.
So, here we are, five years after that painful 2020 election night, and we are again facing the question, because it’s never been resolved:
At the end of the day, what’s the difference between a stack of legitimate votes and a meaningless stack of surplus scratch paper? The pollworkers’ initials. That’s it. That’s the difference.
The initials – whether on the ballot or the tally sheet or the county totals – are what determine an official count of official votes.
Have you ever handed someone a blank check from your own checking account? You can leave the memo field blank, for them to add the invoice number later. It’s still money.
You can leave the amount blank, for them to add the total later (if you really trust them), and it’s still money, as long as you’ve signed it.
But if you leave the signature field blank, all you’ve handed them is a piece of scratch paper. It’s your signature that turns that piece of paper into a legitimate draw on your bank account. Your signature is what transforms it into money.
Similarly, have you ever purchased a gift card at a grocery store? There’s a kiosk or endcap at the start of the checkout line, covered with hundreds of giftcards for a variety of retail stores and restaurants.
Why don’t people steal them all? Because everyone knows that they’re all useless until they’ve been activated. Someone has to enter that number in the cash register and allocate money to the card, or it’s not worth a thing. Your receipt, printed by the cashier, is the proof validating that it’s now a card worth $25 or $50 or $100. Until the cashier has done that step, it’s a worthless piece of plastic.
This is the context that the Democratic Party pundits – and their lapdogs in the media – carefully avoid sharing when discussing this issue of the Georgia ballot count.
They say “What matters is that a person voted, a person stood up and took a pen or stylus and cast his vote; how dare you refuse to count it!”
But that’s simply not true. Until it is validated by a pollworker, it’s not a legal ballot.
This is why most countries on earth don’t allow month-long elections. This is why most countries don’t allow you to print out a ballot on your home computer. This is why sane countries don’t allow party campaign volunteers to “collect” ballots from people’s houses and then drop them – stacks and stacks of them, in fact – in the mailbox.
Because without an official pollworker checking the person’s right to vote – and then making sure he or she only votes that one time – it isn’t an official vote. It can’t be.
Without having a pollworker to act as an “officer of the court,” so to speak, at election time, there is no way to tell a real ballot from a fabricated one.
The press challenges us to bend the rules to support the vote we see or hear about, without any evidence that the vote is valid. For all we know, it might have been mass produced on a photocopier in the basement of some precinct captain or patronage stooge. Without a pollworker’s initials, and the evidence behind it showing how many votes that pollworker properly verified that day, the system simply must assume that the vote is a fabrication.
We have to assume that, because if the system is forced to choose between supporting an unproven ballot and supporting a proven voter, the system must support the proven voter. If we allow unverified ballots to be counted, then we are allowing criminals to dilute the voting strength of the legitimate electorate.
Those initials really aren’t “just a technicality” at all. Those initials, used correctly, constitute the system that protects the sanctity of the election.
And far too often, in recent years, for want of a little official attention to detail, election integrity has indeed been lost.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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