A federal judge in Washington, D.C., said on Wednesday that the United States Postal Service's (USPS) Postmaster General Louis DeJoy must testify in court or be deposed to account for a failure to "sweep" facilities for ballots, as the judge ordered on Tuesday.

"In no uncertain terms, I'm not pleased about this 11th-hour development last night," Judge Emmet Sullivan said, scolding USPS's lawyers. "You can tell your clients that - and someone might have a price to pay." The failure to follow the sweep order, Sullivan said, started "at the top of the food chain" - meaning DeJoy.

The lawyers representing the USPS admitted that the agency did not follow Sullivan's orders from election day, saying that "this was not operationally possible to implement in the limited time available." Sullivan ordered on Tuesday morning that the sweep be conducted at multiple key locations across the country by 3 p.m, but had instructed managers to speed ballots in swing states on Sunday.

According to postal officials, workers only found 13 ballots in the election day sweep. During the hearing, the attorney for the plaintiff, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, received an election protection hotline report that there may be a box of 3,000 ballots in Greensboro, North Carolina, sitting at a processing facility. It is possible that these ballots were not postmarked on time. The USPS has said that they will investigate those ballots.

There were reports of an undelivered 300,000 ballots on Tuesday, but, because the USPS was delivering ballots directly to election officials and not scanning each one at processing facilities, these claims were debunked.

At the hearing Wednesday, Sullivan also ordered an additional sweep in Texas in particular, as the deadline for mail-in ballot delivery was 5 p.m. Wednesday.

It's unclear now how many ballots were not delivered because of the extensive delays in service that began earlier this year under DeJoy. However, as The Hill legal reporter John Kruzel writes on Twitter, "Bottom line: As election law experts have said, every election sees some portion of voters disenfranchised because their ballots arrive late, but it is safe to assume the problem has been exacerbated by USPS delays."

Sharon Zhang is a development fellow at Truthout.

You didn't hear this in the cable TV chatter: In the two years leading up to this election, Georgia's GOP secretary of state quietly wiped away the voter registrations of 198,351 voters - based on false information.

Call it "The Great Purge" - overwhelmingly wiping away the voting rights of young voters and voters of color. In other words, voters who might be more likely to vote blue.

I'm not guessing the number of wrongly purged voters. I directed a team of experts that identified each victim voter for a report issued by the ACLU of Georgia, titled, "Georgia Voter Roll Purge Errors." (Rather than read this technical report, you can just watch the movie, The Purged: The Vanished Voters of Trump's America, a 14-minute flick hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio.) Our expert team, working with Black Voters Matter, a 501(c)4 group dedicated to expanding Black voter engagement, discovered the same game had been played with the voter rolls of Michigan, North Carolina and threatened voters in Wisconsin.

It's no coincidence that these are the states with "surprisingly" lower totals than expected for Joe Biden.

The Purge Game

Here's how the purge game got started. Two years ago, the Supreme Court's right-wing five authorised a new method of "cleaning" voter rolls. The Court agreed with GOP voting officials, beginning with Ohio and Georgia, to purge voter rolls of those who "moved."

The idea sounds fair in theory: If you don't live in Atlanta, you shouldn't vote there, and to do so is a felony crime. But in practice, reality does not line up with officials' claims. At an Atlanta poll, I met Christine Jordan, a 94-year-old who had just been tossed out of the poll. Records said she'd moved, but I went to her home where she showed me photos of her cousin, Martin Luther King, Jr., having dinner with her in that home half a century ago.

In Wisconsin, I met Sequanna Taylor, accused of moving from Milwaukee. Unlikely: Taylor is a Milwaukee County Supervisor! But Jordan, Taylor, and the hundreds of purged voters we filmed and called almost all had one thing in common: They were guilty of voting while Black, or voting while Latinx, Asian American or a student.

Though Michigan has now been called for Biden, we saw the same game there. The rolls were "cleansed" of 313,000 voters, many victims of an older purge scheme called "Interstate Crosscheck." For Democracy Now!, I confronted the Republican Secretary of State's spokesman with his secret purge sheet showing that the state had removed thousands of voters with names like Garcia and Brown on grounds they were registered in other states.

The GOP purge operation claimed that Michael Kelly Brown of Georgia is the same voter as Michael Wayne Brown of Michigan. Yet, most of the Michael Browns and Jose Garcias lost their votes.

Biden has taken Wisconsin. And that's thanks to new Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who made this ugly vote suppression tactic an issue - and so far, blocked The Purge in that state.

Michigan? Despite warnings from the Black Voters Matter Fund and others, the new Democratic leadership of the state simply looked at its shoes and whistled. The purged remained purged, putting Michigan into the potential steal zone.

Mail-In Mayhem

President Trump has said he's going to court because, "We want all voting to stop."

We think he meant "stop the count." This is an attempt to prevent counting mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, which were postmarked by Election Day but received during this week.

I've been warning about the dangers of going postal for 12 years. No, the problem is not, as Trump bleats, "fraudulent" ballots mailed in from Venezuela. Rather, according to a study by MIT, as many as 22 percent of absentee ballots are never counted. It's absurdly easy to lose your mail-in ballot to postage due (100,000 tossed in 2016), scotch tape on the envelope, a "naked" ballot (you must cover one envelope with another) or a challenge to your signature, or simply, late because of a post office delay. The Coronavirus sent the number of mail-in ballots through the roof, heavily tilting Democratic, as Trump voters appear to be unconcerned about getting infected.

And now, the nightmare has lawyers. Given that Wisconsin, a smaller state, had 80,000 ballots coming in after Election Day in the midterms, we can expect well more than that arriving after Election Day in Pennsylvania -enough to possibly determine the presidency.

How will it all shake out? I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball. But this much is clear: Jim Crow is stalking this election.

Joe Biden, in the first debate said, "He [Trump] cannot stop you [the voters] from being able to determine the outcome of this election."

Yes, Joe, it won't be up to Trump to stop the count. According to Article II of the Constitution, that's up to Pennsylvania's legislature and the interpretation of Article II by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Good night and good luck.

Whoever wins the Electoral College, race-based politics will continue to allow the corporate rulers to ignore public demands for relief from the Race to the Bottom and endless war.

Publishing deadlines refuse to adjust to the speed of vote counting, but some truths were evident even as the presidential race was still in play. In his second national contest Donald Trump has maintained -- and among some demographic subsections increased -- his hold on a majority of white voters. The 2020 election thus confirms the tentative verdict of 2016: that majorities of whites will vote their race - side with the White Man's Party -- when the electoral contest is waged mainly on racial terms. The Electoral College system, which was baked into the U.S. Constitution to protect the interests of slave states, continues to give white "race" voters an oversized punch in national contests. Trump bet that he could replicate his 2016 Electoral College win over Hillary Clinton even if he still trailed by nearly three million in the popular vote, as he did the first time. Win or lose, Trump's racial calculation was well-grounded and rational - as proven by the tightness of the 2020 race.

The Democrats, on the other hand, were clearly shocked out of their minds when Trump's race strategy prevailed in 2016. White corporate elites had convinced themselves that the "deplorables" of their race were a diminishing breed who would be trounced in a toe-to-toe national slugfest. The Democrats welcomed Trump's flagrant, "red meat" racist challenge to the Republican establishment, whose dog whistles on race suddenly seemed weak to Amerikkaner ears by comparison. As Wikileaks revealed, Hillary Clinton's operatives encouraged Democrat-friendly media to boost Trump's candidacy, believing he was a straw man that she could easily knock down. As a result, the White Man's Champion got an estimated $5 billion in free airtime - and ultimately won the Electoral College, setting off a civil war within the ruling class that has raged for four years, and will likely not end if Trump is evicted from the White House this time around.

The Democrats wanted to run on race as much as Trump did, because only a race-based campaign allows them to avoid any commitment to bread and butter issues - universal free healthcare, job and income security, free public higher education - that threaten the bi-partisan austerity regime (the Race to the Bottom). Bernie Sanders, not Donald Trump, was seen as the near-existential threat to corporate governance. Therefore, the Democrats and their corporate media partners twice ruthlessly eliminated Sanders from the equation so that they could run against Trump on race, and virtually nothing else - even though, the second time around, the Democrats knew that the outcome would be a cliffhanger. If, when the dust clears, the Democrats have won the presidency, they have only "saved" the public from a Frankenstein of their own, meticulous making. And, they will need Trump, or someone like Trump, again if they are to continue defending the austerity policies that are immiserating majorities of the American people. Race-based campaigns serve both corporate parties.

It is remarkable that Trump's white voter base remained essentially irreducible through four years of relentless assault by most of the ruling class and their media. Trump was actually correct in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln in the sense that no other president has been so relentlessly vilified by such powerful sectors. Beyond denunciation of his race-bating -- which Trump welcomed, because it is the main source of his political potency among the white masses - he was daily accused of acting on behalf of a foreign power, a first for any American president. Yet his "deplorables" did not budge, even as the Covid economy melted around them.

What the Democrats dare not risk, is a contest in which U.S. voters are given the choice of saving their families from destitution and disease or voting their race. The duopoly is designed to preclude such choices. It is a trap, a great two-sided filter that allows the corporate ruling class to shut every political outlet for advocates of people's programs, environmental sanity, peace and real racial justice.

Trump's white base is intact and will remain the core of the Republican (White Man's) Party, with or without Trump at the helm - which is fine for the oligarchs of both parties. Only a race-based duopoly can contain public demands for relief from the Race to the Bottom and endless war.

The election data show that Trump's supporters now include surprisingly large numbers of non-Cuban Hispanics, an indication that the politically white (supremacist) base has new sources to tap and will not be shrinking any time soon. Given such data, the rulers will feel confident in serving up race-based duopoly electoral showdowns every four years, in hopes of putting off a reckoning on economic justice, saving the planet, and peace, forever. It is already quite clear that, in such situations, Black voters will demand nothing but protection from the white hordes, and will create no problems for their corporate "friends."

Of course, none of this is written in stone. There is another politics: a people's politics of the street - the only kind that can defeat corporate power. Black people are good at this kind of politics, once they become disentangled from the Black Misleadership Class - who are right now claiming to have "won" a great victory for the Black masses.

With more substance-less victories like this, Black America is doomed to irrelevance and impotence. A growing cohort of young Black folks understand this and will refuse to go along with the corporate script.

Dump the duopoly. Make a new, people's politics from the street up.

Let's say you're a millionaire. That's a lot of money, right? Now let's say you're a billionaire. That's a lot more money! But how much more?

Think of all those dollars as seconds on a clock. A million seconds would total 11 days - but a billion seconds equals nearly 32 years! Rich is nice, but billionaire-rich is over the moon - and the wealth of billionaires is now zooming out of this world. There are only 2,200 of these uberrich dudes in the world, but the wealth stashed away by these elites hit a new record this summer, averaging more than $4 billion each. They've even pocketed an extra half-billion bucks on average in the midst of the COVID-19 economic crash.

Bear in mind that these fortunate few did nothing to earn this haul. They didn't work harder, didn't get one-digit smarter, didn't create some new breakthrough product to benefit humankind - they could just crank back in their gold-plated La-Z-Boys and let their money make money for them.

Then there are multimillionaire corporate chieftains who are cashing in on their own failure. Having closed stores throughout America, fired thousands of workers, stiffed suppliers and creditors, taken bailout money from taxpayers, and even led their corporations into bankruptcy, the CEOs of such collapsing giants as Hertz, J.C. Penney, and Toys "R" Us have grabbed millions of dollars in - believe it or not - bonus payments! The typical employee at J.C. Penney for example, is held to part-time work, making under $12,000 a year. Thousands of them are now losing even that miserly income as the once-mighty retailer is shutting 154 stores. Yet, the CEO was paid a $4.5 million cash bonus before the company filed for bankruptcy this year.

And still, the corporate establishment wonders why the people consider it a club of heartless, greedy bastards.