Trump Regime Attacks Elections—in Advance

September 7, 2020 | revcom.us

Editors' Note: We aim to keep readers informed about key dimensions of the overall fascist advance of the Trump-Pence regime in a timely way, driving home the urgency of ousting this regime.

In recent weeks, Trump has used the wide scope of executive power in an attempt to “win,” steal, and/or discredit the November 3 election—any one of which could enable his regime to remain in office and consolidate fascist power.

The leading edge of this seems to be attacking mail-in voting, which will be widely used this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump claims that mail-in voting will lead to “the greatest scam in the history of politics,” and he has been wildly distorting stories of “fraud” to justify this. Attorney General Bill Barr has hinted ominously at violence, claiming that mail-in voting “is playing with fire. We’re a very closely divided country.”

Yet even as the White House claims mail-in voting will be a “disaster,” the regime is actively working to sabotage it. Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has had mail sorting machines ripped out of post offices, removed street mailboxes around the country, and cut back on workers’ overtime, making it impossible for the Postal Service to handle the mail now, much less the millions of mail-in ballots expected. On Friday, September 4, a Democratic congresswoman in Florida attempted to visit two post offices after learning from workers of pallets of undelivered mail from late July, but was blocked and threatened by postal police at both locations.

The Republican Party has been organizing “poll watchers,” including recruiting among ex-military, to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods to “monitor” (in other words, intimidate) voters.

On top of this, Trump urged his supporters in North Carolina to do something illegal—to attempt to vote twice—once by mail, once in person. The State Board of Elections quickly responded, “It is illegal to vote twice in an election.” Attorney General Barr backed Trump, saying he didn’t know if voting twice was illegal. But legality isn’t the only point here—what Trump is trying to do is to further sow distrust of voting by mail by floating out the suggestion that people might be able to vote twice because of mail-in voting, which obviously would be voter fraud.

All of this lunacy has a purpose:

Studies report Biden voters are much more likely to vote by mail than Trump supporters, so sabotaging it can suppress the Biden vote, perhaps enough for Trump to “win” the election. (And this is far from the only way Trump is trying to steal the election.)

If Trump is winning the “in person” vote on Election Day, he can insist that the mail-in votes are “not valid” and shouldn’t be counted. Then he can declare “victory,” attempting to create “facts on the ground” that he won, and mobilize federal forces and paramilitary militias loyal to him in an attempt to “dominate the streets” to prevent anyone from protesting. The election could well end up in the courts, but Trump has already packed the federal courts with judges likely to rule in his favor.

If that doesn’t work and Biden becomes president, Trump’s attacks on the elections will have already “delegitimized” Biden’s presidency, laying the groundwork for new waves of fascist violence to disrupt, paralyze, or overturn it.

What all of this points to, as Bob Avakian points out in his August 1 Statement, is that while voting against Trump is actually very important, “Simply relying on voting to oust this regime will almost certainly lead to very bad, even disastrous results.” And “it is of critical and urgent importance to build now truly massive and sustained mobilization around the unifying demand that this regime must be OUT NOW!—with an orientation of being prepared to continue this even past the election, if the situation requires it. ”