The state had removed mail-in requirements for all voters over 65 originally.
Page A4From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Court rules SC mail-voting law unconstitutional; Postal Service advances one that could bar millions from voting by mail.
As it ran on the front
Here's the trick, and it's not even a good trick, it's the same trick every time: you don't need to ban the vote, you just need to make it hard enough that the tired ones give up. South Carolina tried the blunt version - a mail-voting law a federal court just ruled violated the Constitution, flat out, no adjectives required, the ruling did the work.
So the state's version gets struck down. Fine. Case closed, everybody go home. Except nobody goes home, because while South Carolina's lawyers were losing in federal court, the United States Postal Service - the outfit that is supposed to just carry the ballot, not judge it - was advancing a rule of its own, one that reporting says could bar millions of Americans from voting by mail. Not South Carolinians. Millions. Nationwide.…
…(cont) You see the move? You strike down the local version and the national version is already in the mail - pun intended, I'm not sorry - moving through the exact same building that's constitutionally required to be boring. The Postal Service is supposed to be the dullest agency in Washington. You put a stamp on it, it shows up. That's the whole contract. The day it starts deciding whose ballot gets there on time is the day it stops being a mail carrier and starts being a gatekeeper, and gatekeepers get to pick who they like.
Nobody in South Carolina asked for their mail-voting law to be struck down for cruelty - a federal court found it violated the Constitution, which is a specific, checkable thing, not a feeling. And nobody at the Postal Service is going to announce the quiet part, because the quiet part doesn't need announcing when the rule does it for you. You don't have to close the polling place. You just have to make sure the envelope doesn't make it back in time.
The stakes here aren't abstract. Voting by mail is how a shift worker, a nursing-home resident, a soldier overseas gets counted at all. Take the mail out from under that and you haven't reformed anything - you've just found a new door to lock, and this one doesn't need a legislature, a lawsuit, or a name on it. It just needs a rule, and the rule is already moving.
“They lose in South Carolina so they run the same play through the mail room in Washington - you close one door and engineer another, and the ballot never even has to get lost, it just has to get late.”
“This is not disenfranchisement, this is fraud prevention, and if it happens to slow down millions of ballots that's an unfortunate byproduct of - well, that is the effect, but the effect isn't the intent, unless it is, I'd have to check.”
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.