Say what you will about Donald Trump: The man is anything but inflexible. He learns from his mistakes, whether he likes to admit it or not. One critical but entirely understandable mistake he made was to denounce mail-in balloting in the 2020 election and encourage his supporters to vote only in person and only on Election Day.

Indeed, Trump called the totally corrupt practice “totally corrupt” as recently as February.

In theory, this strategy would be fine — if everyone who wanted to vote for Trump actually did so on Election Day. But things happen: People get stuck late at work; people have a family emergency; people get called away on a last-minute business trip. And when certain crucial swing states are decided by a relative handful of votes, even if only one Republican in 50 fails to vote as planned on Election Day, the result can be decisive — as it was in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Which is why, on April 19, Trump posted the following to his Truth Social account: “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!”

Turning off the caps lock, Trump added: “Republicans must win and we will use every appropriate tool to beat the Democrats because they are destroying our country. Whether you vote absentee, by mail, early in-person or on election day, we are going to protect the vote. We make sure your ballot is secure and your voice is heard.”

In 2020, Trump’s reelection campaign earned more than 74 million votes, obliterating his Republican-record 63 million vote total from 2016. And yet Biden somehow managed to draw more than 81 million votes. How? By rigging the system. As Mollie and Mark Hemingway have written:

Instead of election day, we now have an “election season” — during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.

Consider the 2020 election numbers: According to Pew, only 27% of Americans voted in person on Election Day. That’s barely one in four voters casting a ballot in the time-honored way that gave us confidence in our elections. Moreover, while 37% of Trump voters voted on Election Day, only 17% of Biden voters did.

One need not ponder at any great length the Democrats’ confidence and contentment with the current system: They love it, and they defend it because they know it works to their advantage.

Democrats cheat. It’s what they do. By flooding the zone with ballots and making it easier to vote, and by blowing our southern border wide open to more than 10 million illegals, the Democrats have invited into our country an Ohio’s worth of potential voters to their side of the ledger. (Yeah, we all know that noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote in national elections, but if that’s the case, then why are the Democrats also flooding the zone with voter registration forms and requiring that state health and human services agencies hand out voter registration forms to illegal immigrants when they apply for their free government healthcare?) Besides, lots of things are illegal. Somehow, people still do them.

In December, our Nate Jackson lamented the grim but ultimately unsurprising Rasmussen poll finding that one voter in five admitted to having cheated in the 2020 election. This finding reflects mostly the inadvertent cheating, such as when folks fill out a ballot, in part or in full, for a friend or family member — but what about the ballot stuffers? What about the Zuckerberg-funded folks who got out the Democrat vote in Atlanta and Milwaukee and Phoenix, whose states’ razor-thin vote totals accounted for Joe Biden’s 43,000-vote margin of victory in 2020?

This, of course, is no way to run an election. In fact, by eliminating basic ballot-security safeguards and loosening voter-verification requirements, we’ve guaranteed greater fraud. But thanks to the Democrats, these are now the rules of the game, and Republicans can’t fix them unless they win some elections.

This cycle is the perfect time to do so, as the Democrat brand under Joe Biden has never been less appealing. Donald Trump knows this, which is why he’s intent on banking every vote by every means necessary.