The state had removed mail-in requirements for all voters over 65 originally.
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 31 August 2026
Mail-in voting protections struck down in one state, threatened nationwide by new postal rule.
As it ran on the front
South Carolina's mail-in voting statute, held by a federal court this week to violate the state constitution, is survived by the absentee ballots it once processed, and preceded in death by the informal norm that a citizen could vote from a hospital bed, a deployment, or a nursing home without first proving hardship. It was struck down not by legislative repeal but by judicial finding, the way these things go now — quietly, on a docket, with nobody in Columbia holding a press conference to mark the occasion.
It leaves behind, at the federal level, a Postal Service rule now under consideration that could, per the reporting, bar millions of Americans from voting by mail nationwide — not a cousin exactly, more like the same disease showing up in a different organ. The family asks that mourners not treat these as two separate obituaries. They are the same funeral, held in two rooms.…
…(cont) Born sometime in the long wave of absentee-ballot expansions of the last several decades, mail voting protection was never terribly glamorous. It did not attend rallies. It did not raise money. It simply made sure a version of Election Day existed for people who could not physically stand in a line on a Tuesday: the sick, the elderly, the deployed, the working poor whose employer does not do days off. That is who shows up in the casualty count when a rule like this one is drafted in a conference room far from any of them. This is not a close call, and it is not, whatever the accompanying press release says, about ballot security. It is about who gets to be a voter without applying for the privilege in advance.
The whippersnappers drafting the new postal rule will tell you it is about fraud prevention. This obituarist has read a great many fraud statistics over a great many decades, and the fraud rate never seems to require disenfranchising millions to prevent it. That is simply how the math has always run.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your state's mail ballot deadline today, before somebody moves it again.
“One court just said South Carolina's mail rules broke its own constitution, and the same week the post office is drafting a rule that could knock millions off the mail-voting rolls nationwide. Different address, same eviction notice.”
“The federal ruling concerns one state's specific statutory language, it's not a referendum on mail voting generally, and the postal proposal is about ballot handling integrity — look, I understand how it looks lined up like that, but they're unrelated dockets.”
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.