I'll give it a gander.

Voting early locks in your vote before "they" can attempt to bring chaos on election day to keep you from voting.

What chaos you say? Everything from cybersecurity attacks, to having a county give the wrong paper ballot size (like they did in Maricopa Count) to keep Republicans from voting, to having gangs outside precincts (antifa, etc) to keep voters from voting.

Early is now. I wouldn't wait until too close to election day. Do it ASAP. I voted early last Friday a week ago before the weekend.

FWIW I am a poll worker in NC.

We have paper ballots given to voters after an ATV (Authorization to Vote) form is generated. This form has the voter's personal info on it, their precinct's, name, their political party (or not) and they have to sign that the info is true as well as attest to the statements on the form are true (one is that they are a USA citizen).

Each voter has a number generated on their ATV form written on the top of their ballot bc a ballot in early voting in NC is considered to be an absentee ballot (but one where you vote in person). The number records the precinct the voter votes in and the number of the printer that printed out the form and a generated number for that voter and ballot. We write this info on their ballot in a space provided before handing the ballot to the voter to vote. Once the voter marks their ballot, they take it over to the scanner which records how they voted. If they didn't over vote in a contest the scanner will tell them they voted. This info is all stored on a thumb drive.

As far as I know there is no way right now to manipulate your vote becuse the thumb drive in our scanner stays in the scanning machine with a protective seal and access by a special key until early voting is over. The scanning machine keeps a running total of all the ballots that have been accepted into the bin.

This data is no longer totaled before Election Day (new law this year) nor are the absentee ballot results added into the total votes until election day in our county.

Every evening these paper ballots are sealed into the blue bin then taken over to the county board of elections by our election director or assistant. These ballots are not removed unless they need to hand counted if an election result is contested. And are only removed by election board members with both parties present.

Every morning we have to check the scanning machine and sign off that no ballots are in the machine in the emergency bin nor in the new blue empty bin that catches the ballots that day.

Another thing I should add. When a poll worker in my county works the ballot table we are constantly updating the number of ATV forms the voters hand over to us to get a ballot. We make sure the number of ATV forms match the number of ballots that were scanned into the scanning machine. This is also another way to ensure accuracy of the count.

My thoughts are that a cheat can happen after the thumb drives are uploaded into an active computer. And that could happen on election day IMHO when the numbers could be manipulated in a main computer when it is transferred to the state board of election results. So in this case it doesnt matter when you vote if they could do that!

I suspect that with our voter ID in NC and everything else that was tightened up in our elections by our NC Republican majority state legislators we are less likely to have cheating. It can't be stopped completely especially if an illegal alien decides to register to vote and lies about being a citizen. But if that illegal alien does that and doesn't serve in jury duty if called due to being illegal, he WILL suffer the consequences then.