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 midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Court strikes down South Carolina's mail voting limits as Postal Service moves to bar millions.
As it ran on the front
South Carolina's mail-in voting restrictions died this week, struck down by a federal court that found the law had, all along, violated the Constitution it was sworn to uphold. The restrictions were young by legislative standards, and are survived by their author, the legislature, and by a great many voters who spent the intervening years mailing in ballots that may or may not have counted.
The restrictions were preceded in death by a great deal of confidence, expressed at the time of passage, that the law would hold up in court. It did not.…
…(cont) This desk has written enough of these to know the shape a dead law takes: a quiet correction, a ruling nobody outside the state notices, ballots that arrive a little easier next cycle. That is usually where the obituary ends. Not this time. Because even as South Carolina's restriction was being lowered into the ground, a new rule arrived at the U.S. Postal Service, one this desk is obligated to report plainly could bar millions of Americans from voting by mail nationwide — not a state's worth of voters, the whole country's.
That is not customary. Ordinarily the malarkey dies once and stays dead for a decent interval. This is a faster turnaround than this desk has seen, a bit of institutional bunk buried on Tuesday with a replacement filed on Thursday wearing the same suit.
There is a word for a rule that survives every funeral held for its predecessor. This desk will use it once, plainly, and let it lie: the pattern is shit, and the paperwork keeps the shape of due process regardless of what it's actually doing underneath.
The South Carolina restriction leaves behind no children, no institutions grieving its loss — only the voters who will, this cycle, be asked once again to prove the mail still works, filling out one more form to exercise a right the courts just confirmed they already had.
This desk has covered enough of these funerals to know they rarely mean the family gets to rest. A whippersnapper of a rule is already filed to take the old one's place, and the family — every mail voter in the country — should plan accordingly.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your registration, request your ballot early, and mail it back before the next rule arrives to make that harder.
“They lose one restriction in court and file a bigger one at the federal level the same week — that's not coincidence, hon, that's a whack-a-mole game where the mole owns the hammer, and the guy at the end of the bar is the one who has to keep re-registering.”
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.