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 since this was written—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. And now Trump is flying around with a “supporter” who publicly calls for the death penalty for Trumps’s Democratic Party opponents!

BA went on to say in REVOLUTION #8:

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. In some of his August 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 (which started on September 2 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, and HERE for Part Two), 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 Three: MAGA Fascists Are Preparing to Disrupt Vote Counts, Provoke Crisis, and to Take Power—No Matter Who “Wins” the Election

Since 2020, the MAGA movement has unleashed violent threats against election workers (who help at the polling places) and officials who oversee elections at the county and state levels. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold received over 1,000 threats of violence or death in just the last year. More than one in three election workers or officials have quit since 2020, and some have been replaced by hardcore MAGA election deniers. 

Through this process, MAGA is changing some of these local and state boards from tools for conducting elections into vehicles for disrupting, stalling, and perhaps blocking the certification of the elections nationally.

For instance, Georgia’s MAGA-controlled state election board passed a new rule for the 159 county boards. This rule requires each county board to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into the voting before the results can be certified. The rule places no limits on what this “inquiry’ could involve, and another new rule specifically allows county boards to “examine all election-related documentation created in the course of the election.” Legal analysts say that together these rules give county boards the ability “to question, investigate, delay, or even nullify election results.” (Emphasis added.)

And it doesn’t stop there. In states around the U.S., MAGA-run county boards and lone officials have been doing “practice runs” of what happens when they outright refuse to certify an election. A Rolling Stone investigation found 30 officials in eight states who have refused to certify the winner of an election in the last four years. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found “at least 19 election board members across nine Georgia counties … have objected to certifying elections...”

Because these were all minor local elections, and because eventually these MAGA electors agreed to certify, these cases have not attracted much attention. But if dozens or hundreds of fascist-run boards do the same thing in the upcoming presidential election, this could lead to a major constitutional crisis—or even to civil war. 

For those who think it couldn’t happen, it’s worth noting the words of Mark Elias, the lead attorney for the Democratic Party in election-related legal battles: “I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election. Everything we are seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.”

So this is one possible route to power for the fascists—even if they lose the election.

Here is how the election of President normally works—it’s a bit complicated, but important to understand because it is within these “complexities” that the fascists are carving out avenues to canceling out or overturning the election results. So:

First, people vote at thousands of local election sites (or drop boxes or by mail) in each of the 50 states. Next, local election boards add up the votes from the various voting sites, “certify” that the counting and addition was done correctly, and then send the certified total to the state level. There, all the certified county totals in a given state are added together, and that total determines which candidate gets the state’s allotment of “electoral votes.”¹ Then the U.S. Senate counts up the states’ electoral vote totals and on that basis certifies the national vote and declares the one with the most electoral votes to be president. 

Historically this has been a routine process, with officials at all levels (county, state, federal) basically doing arithmetic. Any disputes or accusations of fraud were handled through court actions and/or through recounts that were relatively free from “partisan influence,” not through open-ended “inquiries” by fascist-run election boards. 

But here’s the catch: Under U.S. law, if the Senate does not certify the vote by January 6, the election would likely be thrown into the House of Representatives. In this House vote, each state gets one vote, no matter how big their population or how many electors they have! California has 54 electors, but even if every one of them is pledged to support Harris, California would cast one vote for her. Wyoming has three electors, which will give them one vote in the House as well. 

Currently there are 26 states in which the majority is Republican. Concretely what this means is that even if Harris won the popular vote, if the Senate was unable or unwilling to “certify” that by January 6, the House would decide, and most likely the House would vote 26 to 24 to make Trump president.

It’s also possible that the U.S. Supreme Court—which has a six to three fascist majority—would get involved. For instance, it might rule on whether county boards had the right to refuse to certify the vote, or what “contested” votes could or could not be counted. This is another way that MAGA could attempt an “end run” around the actual election results.

The Potential for Armed Conflict

Another aspect of this is that the refusal of local boards to certify is going to feed the fanatical belief among Trump’s base that the election is being “stolen” from them, “again.” And any or all of the above could lead to a situation where both Trump and Harris are claiming to be the “legitimate” president, and where established institutions like the Supreme Court or Congress don’t have the ability to “settle” the question in a way that most of the population thinks is fair. 

This again creates a lot of room for power moves by the fascists, who have increasingly been whipping up their base with lurid and racist stories of “illegal immigrants flooding the country to steal the election.” What is going on now echoes the build-up towards the January 6 attempted coup in 2021. And now there are also a number of paramilitary militias—some with close ties to police, sheriffs and local Republican Party organizations—that view the elections as “do or die” and could enter into the mix to help violently impose a fascist regime.

The disruption/interruption of the normal certification process also poses the prospect of involvement of the U.S. military, including the National Guard, which, in fascist-controlled states like Texas, Florida, South Dakota and others is under the direct authority of fascist governors and their appointees. 

A professor at the U.S. Naval War College writes that the top level U.S. military and Defense Department leaders are currently wrestling with the prospect that “Regardless of who wins the election, federal and state senior military leaders may face decision-making dilemmas critical to the future of U.S. democracy.” One example he cites is that “following orders from the chain of command may clash with their oaths to the Constitution or personal convictions” of officers and or enlisted personnel. Such dilemmas could become really acute if there is no clear winner in the election—particularly MAGA-controlled sections of the military might decide that Trump was the “legitimate” president and that they would only take orders from him.

While exact developments are uncertain and unpredictable, the overall situation is getting sharper by the day, and could lead to armed conflict between the two contending sections of the ruling class, with different parts of the armed forces, police, etc. backing different sides. 

Conclusion: Orderly elections have long been a key part of the stability of the capitalist-imperialist system in the U.S., a time when people went through the charade of choosing between competing candidates who were all in fact pre-selected and vetted representatives of the ruling class. The rulers used this to resolve differences in their own ranks while the masses walked away with the delusion that they had something to say about what the government would do.  Yet now the “peaceful transfer of power” has become an elusive ghost that the Democrats keep chasing… while the fascists prepare to seize power by any and all means, including civil war. 

Here it is important to return to and ground ourselves in “Something Terrible Or Something Truly Emancipating.” And in relation to the above, we want to emphasize two points. First:

* There is the sharpening conflict at the top, and throughout the country, with society and the “ruling norms” of this system being torn apart, driven especially by the relentless offensive of the fascist forces. Yes, as the “Declaration and Call” makes clear, there are a lot of bad things connected with this, and it could lead to something really terrible; but, if it is seized on and correctly worked on by growing organized forces of revolution, guided by the scientific method and approach of the new communism, it is also possible that we could wrench something really positive out of this—revolution, to put an end to this system and bring something much better into being.

* Bringing into being a revolutionary people in the millions—with an organized force of thousands at the core, leading these millions—is the key objective and necessary focus of revolutionary work now, in preparing to go for all-out revolution, with a real chance to win, as soon as the conditions for that have been brought into being.

And second:

So, in the event of, and in the context of, a new civil war, the approach of the revolutionary forces, led by the new communism, would be to carry out the necessary political work, in combination with the actual fighting, to develop such a civil war into a revolution to achieve the goal of getting rid of this whole system, and replacing it with a radically different and emancipating system based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

Above all, right now, this further emphasizes the crucial importance of working actively, boldly and tirelessly for the necessary political repolarization in society as a whole, and among all sectors of society, in a direction favorable for all-the-way revolution.

To conclude: As the crisis around the elections gets ever deeper, it is posing big questions among the masses about society and the future… and opening up real possibilities for revolution. This prospect calls for urgent political preparation.