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 B1From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
Republican calls elections 'ground zero for the republic'; his party moves to bar millions from voting by mail.
The presumption that a ballot placed in the mail arrives, and counts, is dead. It was not old. It survived, in various forms, for a little over a century, long enough to get soldiers' votes home from two world wars and shut-ins' votes to the courthouse on time most years since. It is survived by a scattering of state statutes, a federal ruling out of South Carolina finding that the version passed there violated the constitution it was supposed to serve, and a proposed Postal Service rule that, should it stand, would keep the ballots of several million citizens from ever reaching a counting room in the first place. It was preceded in death, this week, by the plain language of a Michigan Republican candidate for governor, who called his state's elections 'ground zero for this republic,' a phrase usually reserved for a thing under attack, spoken, in this instance, by a man whose own party is doing the digging. No cause of death was listed on the filing, which is fitting, since nobody involved ever called it a death; they called it review, integrity, a rule, a ruling on a technical violation of the very law restricting the mail ballot in question. That is how these things go now. Nobody kills a ballot access provision in the open. It is litigated to death in one courtroom, regulated to death in one rulemaking, and eulogized, unintentionally, by a man who used the phrase 'ground zero' about the very body he is helping to bury. Mail voting is not survived by any single office responsible for keeping it alive; that was, it turns out, the whole penny-ante trick — spread the responsibility across a court, a postal rule, and a campaign line, so that no one department has to sign the certificate. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check whether your state still lets you vote the way your grandmother did, before the rule changes again and nobody sends a notice.
“They call the election 'ground zero for the republic' with a straight face while their own side is the one trying to keep ballots from ever reaching the counting room — that's not concern, that's the arsonist calling in the fire.”
“This is basic election security, nobody's stopping anybody from voting, we're just making sure the mail — well, if the mail doesn't get there in time that's really a logistics issue, that's not a voting rights issue, those are separate — okay, they're related, but it's not on purpose.”
The receipts
The state had removed mail-in requirements for all voters over 65 originally.
Rep. John James (R-Mich.), who is running for governor in his state, on Sunday called upcoming Michigan elections “ground zero for this republic." “We need to make sure that we stop socialism and that we save the state of Michigan, because…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.