A judge temporarily blocked the agency from implementing a strict new rule governing mail voting. The policy could disproportionately affect Democrats and many battleground elections.
Page B3From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Court strikes down unconstitutional mail-voting limits; Postal Service unveils a rule barring millions from it.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The right to receive a mail ballot without a federal permission slip, born this month in a South Carolina courtroom, when a federal ruling found the state's mail-in voting restrictions violated the Constitution. Survived by several million voters who mail their ballots because the polling place is a bus ride, a shift, or a hospital bed away. Preceded in death by the assumption that once a court settles a thing, it stays settled.
The obituary would like to note the cause of death was not the ruling. The ruling held. What killed it was the next branch over: the Postal Service, which issued a rule that could bar millions from voting by mail, a bit of penny-ante housekeeping that manages to undo in a memo what took a federal court to grant. Nobody voted on the memo. Nobody had to.…
…(cont) This is how it goes, now. You don't need to overturn a ruling anymore. You just need a rule two floors down that nobody reads until the envelope gets rejected in November. It is not overturning, technically. It is bunk, dressed up as a shipping standard.
The deceased leaves behind a great deal of paperwork and not much else. There will be no marker, because there rarely is one for a rule change buried in a service bulletin. There will be no hearing, because a court already had its hearing and this is what came after the hearing, which is the part the civics class never quite gets to.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your state's mail-ballot deadline before the memo finds you at the mailbox instead of at the polls.
“They didn't need to overturn the ruling, they just needed a rule two agencies away that nobody watches. This is the version of voter suppression that doesn't require a legislature, just a mail room with new paperwork. Watch whose ballots go missing in that gap.”
“This is a verification standard, not a ban — the Postal Service is just tightening how it confirms delivery, which happens to slow some ballots, but slowing isn't barring, it's just — it's barring fewer than 'millions' sounds like, hopefully, I haven't seen the actual number.”
The receipts
The state had removed mail-in requirements for all voters over 65 originally.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.