The last time a large part of the electorate refused to accept the clear results of a presidential election, it triggered the start of the Civil War.

Although another civil war is unlikely, the chance that the results of this year’s presidential election will not be accepted by a large part of the electorate has emerged as a real possibility over the last few weeks.

{mosads}GOP nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly said he can only lose the election if it’s rigged, while also implying he might not accept the results in case of defeat. Add to this the results of a recent poll conducted by AP-NORC that showed close to 60 percent of Trump supporters fear there will be extensive voter fraud this election, and you have two key ingredients for a potentially explosive post-election season.

Democrats, for their part, have voiced growing concern that Russia might try to hack the elections, believing the government of President Vladimir Putin prefers Trump to become the next U.S. president.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, for instance, wrote in a letter to FBI Director James Comey on Aug. 27 that he had “become concerned that the threat of the Russian government tampering in our presidential election is more extensive than widely known and may include the intent to falsify official election results.”

Reid, sprinkling his letter with several semi-accusations and odious tie-ins of the Kremlin with the Trump campaign, also called Trump an “ ‘unwitting agent’ of Russia and the Kremlin,” but by voicing his concerns so publicly, he has possibly become an unwitting agent of the Kremlin himself.

What does Vladimir Putin really want? Is it really so important to him to have as his main adversary a highly unpredictable, politically inexperienced, irrational narcissist with an inflammable temperament? Is it so important that he would risk a deep diplomatic crisis over it with the most powerful country in the world?

If so, it would certainly be a departure from the shrewd, strategic behavior Putin has displayed these past years: this includes annexing strategically important Crimea without suffering military casualties, supporting the rebels in eastern Ukraine to advance Russian interests there while stopping short of triggering a full-scale war with Ukraine, testing the NATO defense readiness and response levels through military posturing, using propaganda to sow doubt and division between NATO member states, and stabilizing the position of Syrian President Bashar Assad against relatively low cost and with minimal casualties.

And yet, there is certainly evidence that points to the Kremlin being up to something with regard to the U.S. presidential election.

There was the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, published by WikiLeaks on July 22. WikiLeaks did not reveal the source of the leaked emails, but U.S. intelligence agencies were quick to conclude with “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the hack.

And on Aug. 18, the FBI Cyber Division issued a flash alert saying a state’s Board of Election website had been probed and penetrated between late June and mid-July, which had led to exfiltration of voter registration data. Another state’s Board of Election website had been penetrated in August, but there the hackers had not exfiltrated any data. Yahoo News reported that sources familiar with the FBI bulletin had said the first state was Illinois — where the personal data of up to 200,000 state voters had been downloaded — and the second was Arizona.

According to Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect, the methods and types of hacking tools used to scan for vulnerabilities in state election systems appeared similar to those used in other suspected Russian state-sponsored cyberattacks, including the hack of the World Anti-Doping Agency in early August. The FBI was said to investigate a “possible link” between the DNC hack and the malicious penetration of the voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois.

So were Russian hackers just being sloppy, or was it a tactical gambit meant to establish intent and credible capability?

Unfortunately, tampering with the presidential election is easier than one might think: all but two states follow the winner-take-all system, awarding all of a state’s Electoral College electors to the candidate that wins the plurality of the vote. Manipulating the election process in just a few well-chosen counties could swing an entire state. Add to that the fact that presidential elections are usually decided in just a handful of battleground states, it becomes clear a few counties could sway the entire election.

Making matters worse is that in 2016, several swing states — including Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida — will still be using digital voting machines that hacking experts have demonstrated could be hacked in under a minute. Such machines could be easily infected with a self-duplicating code, which then spreads from machine to machine through an administrator card.

But precisely because it is relatively easy to hack the elections — and everyone knows it — Putin doesn’t actually have to do it. He only has to convince the American public that he intends to do it, and that Russian hackers could pull it off and then make it look like he was involved.

If that was the main goal of these summer hacks, it’s worked.

To actively disrupt the elections without actually interfering, Putin would also need a reliable conduit to spread the rumor that the elections have indeed been hacked. This is where WikiLeaks comes in. Whoever leaked those 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the DNC in July gained the trust of a reliable, independent journalistic organization perceived by many as being more trustworthy than any other news source, be it commercial or government-based.

And so the board is set and all the pieces have been moved into position. Within a few days or weeks of the election, the hacker who leaked the DNC emails could leak new documents to WikiLeaks, this time revealing convincing (though falsified) evidence of extensive hacking of hundreds of paperless digital voting machines. Finding no such evidence, the U.S. intelligence community will deny these attacks happened, but who would the public — especially those who just voted for the candidate who lost — believe?

Should Hillary Clinton win in this scenario, Trump would take the bait of alleged voter fraud faster than a mousetrap can snap shut. Saying he has claimed all along he could only be defeated in case of foul play, he would rally his tens of millions of hardcore supporters and demand nothing less than a do-over.

Clinton would likely demand the same in the event of a Trump victory. Either way, the nation would be dangerously divided and neither candidate would have a clear mandate to lead the nation.

The only real winner would be Vladimir Putin, who, after having successfully executed a dirt-cheap disinformation plot that would have made his old KGB superiors proud, would walk away scot-free, because Washington would be forced to continue denying any election tampering had taken place.

Checkmate.

J.C. Peters is a legal philosopher and historian who frequently publishes about U.S. constitutional law, American and European history and foreign policy issues. He is also the author of the political thriller “The Dog and its Day,” about an assassination attempt of the Republican presidential candidate, now available onAmazonand other major online retailers. For more information, please visitJellePeters.com.