This week the fascists took new major steps to decimate the impact of Black people’s vote and threaten those who participate in the elections process.

To really understand the depth of the outrage taking place, you have to step back to take in some history. The American capitalist-imperialist system built itself on the flesh and bones of 12 generations of enslaved Black people who were forced into a life of the most back-breaking labor, whippings, rapes, child-stealing and worse. Slavery was only broken when it got in the way of capitalist expansion, and even then it took a Civil War to end it. This system has since used everything from lynch mobs to murdering police to laws and prison walls to unspoken understandings to make sure that Black people were and are routinely kept out of jobs, housing, decent health care, and education—facing a slow genocide. The right to vote—as a reflection of what it meant to be treated in the law as a full citizen—itself was only really won when, throughout the Civil Rights movement, Black people and justice-loving people of other races endured broken bones, attack dogs, prison sentences, and even death to win it.

And now, with the white supremacist descendants of the Confederacy in the highest halls of power from the White House to the Supreme Court, and as part of a fascist assault to steal and rig the next election, Black people are being slammed back.

White Supremacist Court Guts the Voting Rights Act and Unleashes Fascist Flood

On April 29, the fascist-packed Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. In a decision that did not openly overturn the Act, they so drastically narrowed its scope that it is dead in all but name. Before the ink was even dry, the Court decision led to a flurry of fascist legislative moves in Southern states aimed at getting rid of Black majority and Democratic Party leaning districts. 

These attacks take place at a time when the fascist section of the ruling class of this country, concentrated in the Republican Party, no longer believes in the "peaceful transfer of power," which has been a foundational norm of this system since the Civil War. And a major crisis around an attempted election theft could emerge around the mid-terms in relation to this, if the vote goes against the fascists and they are not returned to power.

As we wrote in February, "These fascists think that only they are the legitimate rulers of this system—not their ruling class counterparts in the Democratic Party who they are moving to crush. These fascists are actively working to rig and steal the next election—without violence if they can, but through violence if they must.

"Since Trump was prevented from stealing the 2020 election—despite an all-sided campaign which did actually come very close to succeeding—he and those around him have been actively working to steal the next election. On Trump's first day in office, Trump pardoned about 1,500 insurrectionists who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to overturn the 2020 election. In August 2025, Trump asked fascist governors to redraw election maps to openly favor the fascists. He has worked to remake how American elections are run and has repeatedly threatened to run for a third term."

There are three ways this week the fascists have accelerated these moves:

1. The Supreme Court Violated Their Own Rules in Order to Impact the 2026 Midterms

The Supreme Court Ruling in Louisiana v. Callais claimed, as we wrote last week, "that calling for redistricting to address racial disparities in the way voting districts are set up would no longer be accepted, unless it can be proven that the discrimination was deliberate. But at this point, no racist Republi-fascist politician is going to be stupid enough to admit to deliberately discriminating!"

On May 4, the fascist majority on the Supreme Court made an extraordinary move of putting its April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais into effect immediately. This violates their own procedures where the Court normally waits 32 days before sending the judgment back to the lower courts. This was clearly done to allow the fascists in Louisiana and a number of other states to rapidly redraw their congressional map before the 2026 elections. 

2. State After State Moves to Decimate the Black Vote After Supreme Court Ruling

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, a number of states throughout the South rushed the process of jamming in new maps.

Louisiana suspended its May 16 House primaries—already in progress! And they are redrawing maps to erase predominately Black congressional districts.

Tennessee rushed to pass a new congressional map that divided up the majority Black Memphis district into three separate districts, combining them with whiter Republican-leaning areas. Instead of Black voters being concentrated enough to elect a preferred candidate in one district, they were dispersed across several districts.

Florida passed a new congressional map just hours after the Supreme Court decision. This was drafted directly by the office of fascist Governor DeSantis. The new map could give Republicans 4 more seats. 

Alabama: The fascists in state government approved a plan for new U.S. House primaries if courts allow the state to use different congressional districts in this year’s elections—despite the fact that congressional primaries have already started! If allowed, the fascists will restore old maps which were blocked previously by federal courts because they prevented the majority Black Montgomery, AL from combining their voting power.

South Carolina: Republicans are pushing to redraw a district long held by a Black Democratic lawmaker, in a bid to secure all seven of the state’s congressional seats.

Mississippi: Trump himself intervened to urge Mississippi officials to redraw the state’s four congressional districts as part of his national push for Republican states to flip Democratic districts to the GOP before this year’s federal midterm elections. 

The Supreme Court ruling is also likely to effect Texas, Georgia and North Carolina.

At the same time as all this is going on, the Supreme Court of Virginia struck down a congressional map drawn by Democrats—after passage of a voter approved Constitutional amendment. This will eliminate 4 Democratic-leaning U.S. House districts, and give Republicans a major new advantage in the upcoming midterms.

Democrats immediately said they would appeal this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, but there's a good chance the Court will refuse to even hear the case. 

3. The Department of IN-Justice Goes After Election Workers in Fulton County, Georgia

As part of Trump's moves to delegitimize the 2020 election, he has gone after the majority Black Fulton County in Georgia (which went heavily against Trump). Just this week, it came out that Trump's fascist Department of (In)Justice demanded the identities of every worker who staffed the 2020 election in this county, which Atlanta is part of. We wrote previously about Trump overseeing an FBI raid on the election office in Fulton County where they seized 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 elections. 

Trump's DOJ is demanding the names, positions, email addresses, and personal phone numbers of over 3,000 workers who staffed the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga, including volunteers, temporary poll workers, and even bus drivers who operated a mobile voting location. Fulton County is trying to block this in court. 

We don't know how the DOJ intends to use this information, but it could include poring over every e-mail and every text sent and/or received, searching for "evidence" to use to "prove" the tampering with the 2020 election results. And whatever lies they make up, the open intimidation of poll workers is clear. In 2020, Trump spread vicious lies about two poll workers in Fulton County, Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. He accused them of handling a USB device to supposedly tamper with votes (the “USB” was actually candy). The NAACP wrote that this “led to them being inundated with racist messages and death threats, harassed at home, and forced to quit their jobs as election workers.” Ms. Freeman told the Congressional committee investigating Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021: “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere.” 

The Democrats’ Capitulationist Response

The Democrats have mainly responded to this assault with empty bluster. At this point, the leading Democrats are saying the answer to the fascists' wave of racist redistricting is to have their own redistricting plans in place for the 2028 elections—TWO YEARS AWAY!! 

There are two big problems with this:

First, confining your activity to the elections, when the elections themselves are being actively stolen before our eyes, is a deadly capitulation to fascism! This approach is being led by the Democratic Party which is itself a ruling class party of a system rooted in capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, patriarchy and wars for empire. As such, the Democratic Party leaders are extremely concerned about the stability of this system and do not want an anti-fascist movement acting out of the bounds of that system. This is so even though the Democratic Party is the focus of the vicious and even violent attacks of the fascists. 

But second and more fundamentally, voting under this system is not how rights are won under this system. As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has sharply pointed out:

Even the right to vote was not won by voting. That is not how Black people, women, and others won the right to vote. It was won by protesting and fighting against injustice. And that is also true for other rights that have been won when powerful forces have been determined to deny people those rights—it is true in general for truly meaningful positive changes in society. Even where rights that were formerly denied are finally recognized (and “formalized”) by an act of government, this comes about fundamentally as a result of masses of people rising up to demand change.

The elections of this system are about electing one or another representative of this same system. And even when those rulers are sharply divided, as is the case now, the divides are not about calculating the interests of the people. They are sharply divided about how to maintain the stability of America as the world's most vicious exploiter and plunderer of the world's people and resources. The elections of this system force you to choose between war criminals and fascists, while shaping your thinking and confining your activity to the terms of this system. 

Why and How to Defend the Right to Vote

However, when the right to vote is being ripped away, when that is part of a whole fascist locking down of society and ripping away of rights in general, when millions of Black people have been cast to the margins or cast out altogether from any chance at decent jobs, and when a fascist party run by a genocidal maniac wants to seal its grip on power… then it becomes particularly important to defend that right.

This means people taking a stand now against these fascist moves at election rigging through the law and the courts. And it means defending people physically from fascist attacks at the polls if it comes to that. 

But this needs to be done as part of millions demanding the ouster of this whole illegitimate fascist regime which is imperiling the world—taking up the call from RefuseFascism.org for sustained, non-violent protest demanding the Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—Now!

And it needs to be done as part of working to abolish the system that has given rise to these fascists and so many other atrocities. 

As the Declaration from the revcoms, WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM states powerfully:

So long as we are still living under the rule of this system of capitalism-imperialism, we will defend people against attacks on their lives and on the rights that are supposed to be guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. But we need a whole different system, with a whole different Constitution—the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America—which will provide much greater rights for the people, including the basic right to have the fundamentally determining role in a new society and government whose purpose and goal is to eliminate all exploitation and oppression, everywhere.