The state had removed mail-in requirements for all voters over 65 originally.
Page B2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 30 August 2026
South Carolina's mail voting law ruled unconstitutional; Postal Service rule may bar millions anyway.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: Convenient Access to the Mail-In Ballot, address multiple, died this week after a short and confusing illness, following complications from a federal court ruling that went the right way in exactly one state.
Born sometime in the early wartime expansions of absentee balloting, Convenient Access grew up quietly, mostly unnoticed, doing the unglamorous work of letting the shift worker, the deployed soldier, the elderly voter three flights up without an elevator, cast a ballot without missing a paycheck or a physical therapy appointment to do it.…
…(cont) It is survived by a federal ruling out of South Carolina, which found that the state's mail-in voting law violated the constitution — a small mercy, arriving, as these things do, well after the damage had already been budgeted for. It is preceded in death, nationally, by a new Postal Service rule that could bar millions of Americans from voting by mail altogether, a rule that did not wait for South Carolina's funeral to start digging one of its own, considerably larger.
The family asks that mourners not confuse the two events. One court fixed a leak in one house. The other event turned off the water main for the block. Both ran in the same week's paper, and a whippersnapper reading only the first headline could be forgiven for thinking the plumbing was fine.
Convenient Access leaves behind no children, only voters, who will now be asked to prove, in whatever manner a much larger institution deems sufficient, that a piece of mail is still a piece of mail. Some of that proof will be malarkey. Some of it will simply take time nobody working an hourly job has to spare. That is not an editorial judgment. That is what a rule barring millions, on its face, does.
There will be no service. The Postal Service, appropriately, has other things to deliver.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that anyone still able to vote in person do so, early, and that anyone counting the ballots afterward count the ones that got there before the rule did.
“They killed one voting restriction in court and grew a new one at the post office the same week — that's not progress, that's whack-a-mole where the hammer never touches the guys running the game. Every one of these lands on somebody who can't just drive to the courthouse instead.”
“The Postal Service rule is about mail security and chain-of-custody, not disenfranchisement — any effect on millions of voters would be incidental. Did I say millions? That's the worst-case estimate, obviously it won't actually — well, it could reach millions. It's a security measure.”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.