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 late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Court strikes down South Carolina's mail-voting law as unconstitutional; Postal Service unveils a national one.
As it ran on the front
DIED: Reliable access to the mail-in ballot, nationwide, following complications from a new United States Postal Service rule announced this week. Age six years, having been born in the spring of 2020, when a pandemic and a functioning postal system proved, together, that a ballot could travel from a kitchen table to a county clerk's office and back without anybody standing in a line.
Preceded in death by South Carolina's own mail-in voting statute, struck down this month by a federal court for violating the very constitution the legislature claimed to be protecting when it wrote the thing. The family notes, with no particular surprise, that the same machinery can be broken by both a state legislature building the failure in on purpose and a federal agency simply changing the schedule.…
…(cont) Survived by: the tens of millions of voters, in states well beyond South Carolina, who now must reckon with a postal rule that the New York Times reports could bar millions of them from casting a ballot by mail at all; by county election boards, who will explain the new deadlines to voters this fall whether the agency has explained them or not; and by the Postal Service itself, an institution that delivered a ballot through a pandemic and is now, this obituary notes gently, the one holding the pen.
Not survived by: any explanation, offered so far, of what problem this solves that the courts had not already solved, state by state, the old-fashioned way — one unconstitutional statute at a time.
The deceased is remembered by election workers for arriving, every cycle, without complaint, without fanfare, and without asking anyone's permission to be convenient. It did the job quietly for six years and expected no monument for it, which is more than this column can say for a lot of institutions currently receiving one.
This is penny-ante business dressed up as procedure, and the family declines to pretend otherwise. It is not bunk to point out that a right exercised by tens of millions of people, quietly, by mail, for six years running, does not require a national rule change the very week after a state loses in court for trying the smaller version of the same idea.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you find your county's mail-ballot deadline now, in writing, before the rule finds it for you.
“Watch the order of operations: a state tries to choke off mail ballots, a court says no, and weeks later a federal rule does the same job with better paperwork. You don't need a conspiracy when the agency just does it for you in broad daylight.”
“The Postal Service rule is about scheduling integrity, not suppression — mail has deadlines, ballots are mail, that's just — okay, it is specifically about ballots, and it does specifically make some of them arrive too late to count. That's not the line we practiced.”
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.