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.
Page B2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
The least transparent midterm on record arrives with late mail ballots getting tossed
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY: The Verifiable Mail Ballot, a fixture of American self-government since voters began mailing them in, died this year, in transit, of delay. It was tossed.
It is survived by the postmark, which still exists but increasingly arrives after the deadline that used to make it count. It is survived by the county election boards who counted it, obligingly, until this year, when more of it arrived late and more of it went, as the record states plainly, into the discard pile. It was preceded in death by the plain assumption that a ballot mailed on time is a ballot counted, a piece of common sense that outlived a great many things before it didn't outlive this one.…
…(cont) The Ballot's passing was not sudden. It was attended, in its final season, by what is now being called the least transparent midterm on record, an election conducted substantially on money whose source the public is not shown. The dark money did not cause the late ballots; nobody at this paper claims that. It is simply the case that the same cycle in which a great deal of unaccounted spending arrived on time managed to see a good many ballots from actual voters arrive late, and the record of who gets counted and who gets a postmark stamped after the fact is now filed under 2026.
This is not malarkey, or it would be nice if it were. It is a filing cabinet with two drawers, one marked money, untraceable, on time, and one marked votes, traceable, late, and the drawers do not weigh the same, which is a shit arrangement for a system that used to at least pretend otherwise. That is not bunk either. It is the record.
The Ballot leaves behind no successor process, no fix noted anywhere in the file, and no explanation for why the money moves faster than the mail.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you check your own ballot's postmark twice, and ask your county board, out loud, what happens to the ones that arrive a day too late.
“They flood the race with money nobody has to name, and the ballots that show up a day late from actual people get thrown in the trash — one of those piles moves faster than the mail, and it's not the one with your name on it.”
“Ballots have deadlines, that's just how mail works, and dark money is fully legal, disclosed where the law requires disclosure, which is — some places, look, disclosure is complicated, the point is nobody broke a rule, the rules just don't say much.”
The receipts
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.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.