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 A5From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 31 August 2026
Court strikes down South Carolina's mail voting limits as unconstitutional; Postal Service floats rule that could bar millions.
As it ran on the front
Two things happened in the same week and neither of them made the evening news the way they should have. A federal court found that South Carolina's mail-in voting law violates the Constitution. That's not a talking point, that's a ruling, on the books, plain as the tax code. And in the same stretch of days, the United States Postal Service floated a rule that could bar millions of Americans from voting by mail at all.
Read that order again, because the order is the whole story. First a court says a state went too far restricting the ballot. Then, before the ink is dry, the federal mail carrier — the outfit that is supposed to be neutral, the outfit every one of us pays for whether we vote or not — proposes a rule that does the restricting for them, nationwide, no state legislature required.…
…(cont) This is the part nobody wants to say plain: you don't need a law to suppress a vote if you can just slow down the mail. A ballot that arrives a day late doesn't get counted, doesn't matter why it was late, doesn't matter whose signature was on it. The rule doesn't need to say 'these people' — it just needs to say 'this deadline,' and let the deadline do the work the law wasn't allowed to do.
And who does a slower mail system land hardest on? Rural voters waiting on a truck that comes twice a week. Elderly voters who can't stand in a line for three hours. Deployed service members whose ballot has to cross an ocean and back. Not exactly a coincidence which Americans depend most on the mail to vote at all.
Follow the money and the memo both, because they're headed the same direction. A court closes a door in South Carolina. The Postal Service quietly opens a smaller one nationwide, marked 'processing delay.' Nobody has to pass a law when the mail itself can be arranged to arrive too late to matter. That's not bureaucracy. That's a workaround with a tracking number.
“Two things happened in the same week and neither of them made the evening news the way they should have. A federal court found that South Carolina's mail-in voting law violates the Constitution. That's not a talking point, that's a ruling, on the books. And in the same stretch of days, the Postal Service floated a rule that could bar millions of Americans from voting by mail at all. A court closes one door; the mail quietly opens a smaller one nationwide.”
“The Postal Service is simply tightening ballot verification standards, not blocking anyone — most of these voters, this reporter would note, live in areas already served by actual polling places. That's not disenfranchisement, that's efficiency. If it were disenfranchisement, a court wouldn't have — oh. One did. Never mind.”
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.