State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.
Page B1From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
Mail ballots are being tossed this midterm as dark money floods it without disclosure.
As it ran on the front
DIED: the presumption that a ballot postmarked on time gets counted on time. Born sometime around the advent of mail voting itself, the presumption is survived, this cycle, by a growing pile of late-arriving ballots that are being tossed rather than counted, according to reporting this week — not because the voter did anything wrong, but because the mail did what the mail sometimes does, which is arrive late. The ballots did not fail. The clock did.
DIED ALONGSIDE IT: transparency in how the 2026 midterm is being financed. This one is survived by an unusually large amount of money moving through channels that do not require anyone to say where the money came from — dark money, as the trade calls it, though the description undersells how well-lit the spending itself is. The money buys airtime. It buys mailers. It does not buy a return address. That's not corruption, exactly. That's just the shape of malarkey when it's filed on time.…
…(cont) Preceded in death by: the norm that both halves of an election — who gets to vote, and who gets to pay for influencing that vote — operate under roughly comparable scrutiny. That norm went first. What's left this cycle is a system that audits the voter down to the postmark and asks nothing of the donor beyond a check that clears.
There is no funeral for a presumption. Nobody sends flowers to a deadline. But it is worth noting, for the record, what got buried quietly this week while the bigger stories ran: a stack of ballots that arrived a day or two late through no fault of the people who mailed them, and a stack of money that arrived exactly on time and asked no questions of itself.
He is survived by a handful of state election boards still counting what they can, and preceded in death by whatever version of this system used to require a name on the check.
In lieu of flowers, the family — meaning anyone who still wants to know both who voted and who paid for the ads telling them how — asks that you support disclosure requirements for the second stack of paper, the same way we already require them for the first.
“They'll toss your ballot for arriving a day late through no fault of yours, but there's no deadline, no disclosure, and no return address required on the money flooding in to decide who's on that ballot in the first place. One kind of paper gets audited to the day. The other kind doesn't have to say where it came from.”
“Deadlines exist for a reason — you can't count votes forever, and a hard cutoff protects the integrity of the count. As for the disclosure question, well, campaign finance law is complicated, there are legitimate groups that don't have to itemize, and — actually, 'don't have to itemize' is sort of the whole complaint here, isn't it.”
The receipts
At least $1 billion from anonymous donors is flowing into the midterm elections. Dark money is not new, but it now permeates nearly every major contest.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.