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 A8From§Eachthe early evening edition — 30 August 2026
Court rules South Carolina's mail-voting limits unconstitutional; Postal Service drafts a rule to bar millions anyway
As it ran on the front
Here's how you kill a policy without ever having your name on the bill. You wait for the court to strike one version down, South Carolina's mail-in voting law, ruled this week to violate the constitution, a version of restriction tried at the state level and buried by a federal judge, on the record, done. And then you go around the courthouse entirely. You don't refile. You don't appeal. You go to an agency nobody watches and you write a rule.
The Postal Service rule under discussion could bar millions of people from voting by mail. Not 'could affect processing times.' Bar millions. That's the language being used about a federal mail agency, the one whose entire job for two hundred and fifty years has been to move a piece of paper from one address to another, now positioned as a chokepoint for who gets to participate in choosing their own government.…
…(cont) You don't need a law when you have a loading dock. That's the trick, and it's not new, it's just gotten quieter. Nobody has to stand at a podium and say 'we are making it harder to vote.' You adjust a delivery standard, tighten a deadline, reclassify a form, and six months later there's a county in some state where forty thousand ballots didn't make the cutoff, and by the time anybody notices, the election's over and the numbers are the numbers.
The South Carolina ruling should have been the tell. A federal judge looked at that state's mail-voting restrictions and said, in plain terms, this violates the constitution. That's not a close call, that's not a technicality, that's a court telling a state government it broke the highest law in the country trying to make it harder for people to vote by mail. And the response, apparently, isn't 'let's not do that.' It's 'let's find an agency that isn't a state legislature and try again.'
I'm not telling you it's a plot with a map and a war room. It's simpler than that. It's just that every single time one door on mail voting gets shut by a court, another door, somewhere quieter, with a different letterhead, opens right back up. You'll notice the doors are never opening. Only closing. Watch which zip codes end up on the wrong side of the deadline, and then tell me it's about logistics.
“You get a federal judge to say South Carolina broke the constitution restricting mail ballots, and before the ink's dry the Postal Service is drafting a rule that does the same job nationwide, just wearing a different hat. It's not incompetence, it's rotation, you knock one door shut and a second one opens in a different building. Watch whose ballots get lost in the shuffle.”
“The Postal Service rule is a routine logistics update, not a voting restriction, nobody's mail is being 'barred,' packages just need to meet delivery standards like everything else. The South Carolina ruling is a separate state matter about a specific statute, it has nothing to do with — well, they're both about mail ballots, I see that, but the intent is completely different. It's an efficiency measure. Mostly.”
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.