Ready to vote, to take away Trump’s Midwest states. In the US there is a phenomenon unknown until now, the mass registration of American citizens of Islamic faith to the lists of voters who in a few months will choose between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

To say that it is a mass phenomenon is actually almost hyperbole, since in the whole Muslim community it amounts to a low percentage point of the total population, but this is not the point.

What matters is that so far that one percent considered itself detached, if not a stranger, from participating in public life, while now it trembles to make its voice heard, and no matter how weak it may be.

It is not the verb of participatory democracy preached by Bernie Sanders to push them to the voting booth, but the chill they feel around them since last December, that is when a couple of terrorists attacked a center for the disabled in San Bernardino in California . Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, husband and wife and a life devoted to intolerance, killed 14 between young and old, and proclaimed they had done it in the name and on behalf of IS.

The next day the then picturesque pretender to the Republican nomination  promising “complete closure of access to the United States for Muslims”. He probably did not think what today is a candidate for the White House that everyone is forced to take seriously, that there are already Muslims in America, and they are not few. And now that Trump is playing the destinies of them and the rest of the country, they have democratically chosen to block his way.

The idea came from the United States Council of Muslim Organizations, which brings together most of the organizations of the diverse American Islamic world. “When your very existence is in danger in the society you live in, the only thing you can do is mobilize those like you,” explained general secretary Oussama Jammal. giving the idea. The idea is this: to bring one million Muslims here to join the electoral register in November, to try to determine the outcome of the presidential elections.

It is no coincidence that the action is concentrated in some areas in particular, starting with swing states, states hovering between Hillary and The Donald, where even a handful of votes can make the difference. A handful is enough: “A few thousand and an entire state can be decided”, explain the experts of electoral flows. They are, in good part, the states of the Midwest, precisely those where the Americans of the first generation are more easily accommodated, or the immigrants now naturalized.

The effects are already beginning to be visible: 60 percent of the community has already been registered, but the figure is still not considered sufficient, and in fact the percentage among Jews and Catholics, for example, is much higher and reaches ’86. But the trend is growing, driven in part by the anxiety of feeling full citizens, in greater part by the anxiety generated by the fear of a Trump victory.

A study on Islamophobia carried out by the authoritative Georgetown University, and published in May, shows data in hand that the problem is real: since Trump began to verbally bomb Muslims, “the attacks on American soil against Muslims have tripled, and half of these were carried out against mosques and places of worship “.

A Muslim’s chances of being a victim of religious discrimination or violence have doubled, the report explains (“When Islamophobia turns violent: the 2016 Presidential Elections”), and in the aftermath of the most violent statements by the Republican candidate serious episodes intolerance repeated more than once a day.

A serious and predictable effect. The unpredictable was the race of Muslims to swell the electoral registers of a democracy where voter turnout is lower than in Italy. And so, where even a million votes count a lot, maybe twice as much, maybe all the mail.