Introduction: Throughout his social media dispatches this year, the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) has hammered home the theme that this is not a “normal” election year, and he’s gone into what this means for the oppressed and those who hate oppression. Earlier this year, BA said:

[S]ome people would love to be rid of all the terrible and unnecessary suffering that is actually caused by this system—but they just think the revolution I’m talking about could never happen.

Well, the truth is: it could happen—not just in some far off place and time, but right here and right in this time we are living in.

The basic reason why this revolution is possible now is because those who have ruled this country for so long are bitterly and deeply divided among themselves, while the country as a whole is being torn apart by divisions that can no longer be covered over and things can no longer be held together in the way they have been for generations. (from REVOLUTION #8, @BobAvakianOfficial)

Think about some of the craziness that has gone down just since this was written—everything from the attempted assassination of one presidential candidate to the sitting president of the other party being forced to give up the nomination he seemed to have already won. 

BA immediately went on to say in this post that:

Everything will very likely be coming to a head and coming up for grabs this year, 2024, with the presidential election this year a sharp focus of the fight between the dominating ruling class parties—Democrats and Republicans—a fight that is very likely to break all out of the bounds of the “normal way” they exercise power over the people, and keep their whole murderous system going.

The fascist Republicans are actively preparing for this fight. They are mobilizing their fanatical supporters to break whatever rules they need to break by whatever means they need to break them.

But the Democrats are acting as if this is a normal election in which their supporters just need to make sure to vote. This week, in some of his most recent dispatches which we are reprinting, Bob Avakian goes deeply into how the speeches of the Obamas and others at the convention consciously steered people away from understanding the FASCIST character of what is going on. The Democrats worked to conceal this crucial reality for two reasons. One, such an admission could call into question for millions what kind of system is this anyway, where such a thing can happen. And two, if masses of people opposed to fascism did go into the streets to resist this, it could get all out of control of the Democrats and PEOPLE could begin to actively seek out and fight for not just liberal or even “radical” solutions, but revolutionary and emancipating solutions to this madness.

As this series we started last week at revcom.us, “The Fascist Attacks on the Elections and the Need to Actively Prepare for the Coming Showdown,” makes clear (go HERE for Part One), this fight is not just coming—it is already here, in beginning but very intense forms. As an accompaniment to this series, we are including an extremely relevant section of Bob Avakian’s 2021 talk SOMETHING TERRIBLE OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING: Profound Crisis, Deepening Divisions, The Looming Possibility of Civil War—And The Revolution That Is Urgently Needed, which gets into some of the implications of this.

Part Two: Suppressing the Vote

The Republi-fascists have launched a wide array of measures to suppress the vote of Black,¹ Latino and Native people, as well as students and other groups that tend to vote Democratic. And this has been escalating in recent weeks. Some examples:

• In Georgia, two new laws allow anyone to “challenge” the registration of anyone else. Then it is on the “challenged” voter to reestablish their right to vote—or to lose it. A “secretive network of ultra-wealthy Christians” (Christian fascists) known as Ziklag and others are using computer software to comb through the state’s voter rolls and challenge hundreds of thousands of people for any little discrepancy, (like using “Jr.” on one form and leaving it off another). “Black voters … have been disproportionally impacted.” 
• Ziklag plans to put at least $800,000 “into knocking more than a million voters off the voting rolls” in Arizona’s Maricopa County and Georgia’s Fulton County, both of which have large non-white populations.² In Alabama, the secretary of state recently purged more than 3,000 voters from the rolls, some of them naturalized citizens.
• Florida, Kansas, Tennessee, Missouri and Alabama have all passed laws to tightly restrict voter registration drives organized by civic and political groups and Black churches. These laws threaten these groups with massive fines if they turn in a registration form with a mistake (like a wrong street number). As an organizer at the University of Florida said, “you have to tell every volunteer that if they screw up, there may be a $50,000 fine.”
  In Florida, before the new law these groups would register as many as 63,000 voters in a year. The first year after the law, they registered 5,583!
• The Christian fascist attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, is suing Harris and Bexar county governments to prevent them from mailing voter registration forms to county residents who have not yet registered. These two counties (home to Houston and San Antonio, the two biggest cities in the state) are both either plurality or majority Latino. In fact, one in five of all Texas Latinos live in Harris County. Harris County has already postponed their voter registration rollout as a result of this and other threats.

In the eyes of these fascists, encouraging certain people to register to vote is criminal activity, and these lawsuits are part of a larger array of measures to suppress the Latino vote. Republi-fascists have also kicked around the idea of putting up signs in Latino neighborhoods warning people that it is illegal for non-citizens to vote, and of poring through the voter roles looking for “ethnic names” to challenge their right to vote. A rural voting official in Georgia who asked members of her staff if any of them spoke Spanish was accused of “recruiting undocumented immigrants to vote”!³

Measures like this send a clear message to all Latinos—including those who were born in the U.S., naturalized citizens, and legally documented immigrants—that voting could be dangerous, could bring harassment from cops or vigilantes, could draw attention to family members who are trying to legalize their status. It is blatant intimidation. 

Paxton and other Republi-fascists claim that they are just trying to prevent non-citizens from registering. It is already a serious—and deportable—crime for non-citizen immigrants to vote, and it is also extremely rare, literally a few dozen cases nationally.⁴

But this is also more than just suppressing the Latino vote. And it is more than just creating “evidence” for claiming “the election was stolen” if Trump loses. This effort is bound up with the whole fascist campaign of fearmongering about “illegal immigrants” being “criminals,” and trying to “take over,” which has been promoted by white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations for years, and has been fuel for a number of mass killings of Latinos and Jewish people. As Paxton put it on Glenn Beck’s talk show: “This was the plan, tell the cartels, ‘Get people here as fast as possible, as many as possible, we’re not going to make them hide anymore—we’ll get them placed in the right states. …They want to fix the election so that we have a one-party country that we can’t fix.'”

• Alabama, Mississippi and Nebraska are trying to permanently strip people convicted of felonies of the right to vote—even after they have served their sentence. Decades of “mass incarceration,” “stop-and-frisk,” and just run-of-the-mill pig racism resulted in Black people having triple the rate of felony convictions as their share of the population. Now that gross injustice is being used to further strip them of their rights as citizens.
• Arizona and other states are trying to impose new laws that require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register—usually a birth certificate or a passport. About 21.3 million voting age U.S. citizens do not have or cannot readily access the required documents. Last week Arizona—backed by 24 other states—asked the U.S. Supreme Court to approve kicking 40,000 already-registered Arizona voters off the voting rolls because they had been enrolled under a federal program in which they swore—under penalty of perjury—that they were citizens, but were not required to show the documents.
  The Court did not approve that, but very significantly, it ruled that going forward Arizona could enforce the law on new registrants. This will prevent some from voting, create confusion and fear among others, and will give a boost to similar bills in 12 other states.
  Now the RNC is pushing for a federal law requiring these documents to vote, and Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, is reportedly “under pressure” to “shut down the government” if the law isn’t passed.

• In July, the RNC called for mobilizing 100,000 so-called “poll watchers,” to make sure the election is not “stolen.” As of mid-August they claimed to have signed up 157,000, with a goal of being able to “observe” every vote cast and all ballot counting. But when they say “poll watchers,” think about how fascists “watched the polls” in 2020. Remember Detroit, where mainly Black election workers “hunkered down and kept working as a mob of people … battered on the doors and bellowed at election workers as they were counting ballots.” Remember Atlanta, where Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman were accused of “handling a USB device to supposedly tamper with votes” (the “USB” was actually candy) and how that “led to them being inundated with racist messages and death threats, harassed at home, and forced to quit their jobs as election workers.”
• The RNC admits that it will be recruiting poll watchers from largely white suburbs and dispatching them to mainly non-white urban areas. And on top of this “official” effort, the chairman of the RNC admits that the RNC does “interface” with other groups doing their own “monitoring” operations. An RNC strategist described these groups as “roving gangs of armed civilians who think they are lawmen.” 
• There are also “free-lance” Christian fascist groups organizing poll watchers. The “Lion of Judah” group has been traveling through the swing states of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, holding pro-Trump tent revivals, recruiting “poll watchers” openly for the goal of ensuring a Trump victory, and saying this is a mission from God to “help my body come together as one.” Imagine having partisan religious fanatics like this “observing” people as they vote!

All this is meant to “put a thumb on the scale” of an election that is already expected to be very close. And at the same time, it helps promote the lie that large numbers of people are voting “illegally.” If Trump loses, this will all be “evidence” that “the election was stolen” and will likely be used to justify violence to put the “real” president in power.

Next Week, Part Three: Republi-fascists Taking Control of the Election Apparatus So They Can Sabotage Certification of the Vote