Vote Early and Vote Often
Tom Stoppard’s line: ‘It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting’ is well known, but is in fact closely paralled by a remark of Stalin’s in 1923: ‘I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how’. The importance of counting was recognized long ago: in the early nineteenth century the American politician William Porcher Miles described seeing election banners with the advice: ‘Vote early and vote often’.