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 milkman edition — 31 August 2026
South Carolina's mail-in voting ruled unconstitutional as Postal Service moves to bar millions from voting by mail
As it ran on the front
Died this week, in stages, in a federal courtroom in South Carolina and in a rulemaking docket at the United States Postal Service: the presumption that a citizen could cast a ballot from home and reasonably expect it to count. It was not old. The South Carolina mail-in ballot framework a federal ruling has now found in violation of the state constitution had been in place only a handful of election cycles. The proposed USPS rule threatening to bar millions from voting by mail is younger still — a policy still in its infancy, dead, by design, before it ever had to grow up.
The mail-in ballot protection is survived by: a shrinking number of states where a stamp and a mailbox are still sufficient; several million voters, disproportionately elderly, disabled, rural, or simply working a shift that doesn't clear in time to stand in a line; and the memory of an election this same protection helped run without incident, a fact nobody currently drafting policy seems eager to put in the file.…
…(cont) It is preceded in death by: the assumption that expanding who could vote was, on its own, a good and uncontroversial thing to do. That assumption did not survive contact with a state legislature and a federal agency working, this obituary notes without further comment, on parallel timelines toward the same result.
Mort has covered a great many bunk arguments dressed up as ballot integrity over the years, and this one does not bother hiding its shit: you do not need to steal an election if you can simply make it structurally harder for the other side's coalition to vote from where they live. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a courtroom filing and a rulemaking docket, both real, both dated, both public record.
No cause of death has been officially assigned, though this obituary notes that a federal court and a federal agency rarely arrive at the same conclusion in the same season by accident.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your state's mail ballot deadline today, before the rest of this policy finishes its work.
“First a federal judge says South Carolina's mail ballot law breaks the constitution, then the Postal Service floats a rule that could keep millions of ballots from ever reaching a mailbox. That's not two separate stories, that's one machine tightening from both ends. You don't need to steal an election if nobody's allowed to vote absentee in the first place.”
“The Postal Service rule is about mail security and delivery standards, full stop, it has nothing to do with — well, it affects ballots the same as any other mail, so technically it does touch — no, uniform delivery standards apply to everyone equally, they're not targeted at — I'm not going to say who they're not targeted at, I'll just say: equally. It's equal. That's the line.”
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.