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 A4From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
South Carolina's mail voting law ruled unconstitutional as USPS moves to bar millions from voting by mail.
As it ran on the front
Two stories, days apart, same subject: your ballot. First, a federal court rules that South Carolina's own mail-in voting law violates the constitution, not the ballots, the law regulating them, thrown out by a judge, illegal on the books this whole time. Second, not long after, the U.S. Postal Service proposes a rule that could bar millions of people nationwide from voting by mail at all. Read the order of that twice. The system just got told, officially, under oath, that it wrote its own mail-voting rules wrong. The response wasn't to loosen the thing. It was to make the mailbox itself smaller.
This is the part nobody says on the news at six: 'ballot integrity' as a phrase only ever moves in one direction, and it's not toward more people voting. Every time a mail-voting law gets struck down for being too restrictive, the fix on offer is never 'let's make it easier.' It's a new rule, from a different building, that tightens the same door from the other side. South Carolina loses in court one week; the Postal Service floats a rule that does nationally what South Carolina just got told it couldn't do locally. That's not two unrelated stories. That's one policy wearing two different letterheads.…
…(cont) Millions is not my word, it's the number in the actual story about the actual rule. Millions of people who currently vote by mail, the elderly, people with disabilities, people two jobs deep who can't take a Tuesday off, are the ones sitting on the other side of that rule change. Nobody's mailing them a court order explaining why their ballot got harder to cast the same season a judge said the last version of this idea was illegal.
You want to know who benefits from a mailbox that's harder to use. It's never the guy with three lawyers and a car service to the polling place. It's the guy who can't leave the register at the second job, the guy whose knees don't do stairs at the courthouse anymore. In lieu of a fact-check, check whether your own state's mail ballot deadline moved this year, and if it did, ask who moved it and what they called it while they did.
“A federal court just told South Carolina its own mail-ballot law was illegal, and the response from Washington a few days later wasn't to loosen the rules, it was a Postal Service proposal that tightens the mailbox for millions more people nationwide. That's not two stories, that's one policy wearing two letterheads.”
“The Postal Service rule is about delivery standards and efficiency, not access, full stop. And frankly if a mail law already got struck down in South Carolina, that just proves the system of checks works exactly as designed, which is also somehow the same broken system we're now saying needs a new federal mail rule to fix, so, I may have just made both arguments there, give me a second.”
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.