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 F3From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 31 August 2026
Dark money floods the 2026 midterms undisclosed while late mail ballots get tossed
As it ran on the front
Run the two filings side by side. Column one: political spending ahead of the 2026 midterms, routed through vehicles that do not require the donor's name to appear anywhere a voter could find it before casting a ballot. The reporting calls this the least transparent midterm on record, a superlative, which for this office counts as a number even when it isn't printed as one. Column two: mail ballots, arriving later this cycle than in prior cycles, and getting tossed — not flagged, not cured, tossed — when they cross the deadline by a margin usually measured in a day, sometimes less.
Reconcile those two columns and here is the gap, hon: one kind of participation in this election requires a name, a signature, a postmark, and a deadline enforced to the day. The other kind requires none of those things and is not enforced at all. A dollar moving through an undisclosed vehicle arrives on time by definition, because there is no deadline for it to miss. A ballot in an envelope has one shot, and if the postal service is slow that week, the voter's shot is gone and nobody re-runs it.…
…(cont) This office does not have the donor names. That is the finding, not a gap in the finding — the not-having is the story. What this office does have is a count: more mail ballots tossed this cycle than prior cycles, filed the same season as reporting on the least transparent midterm this outlet has tracked. Both facts ran the same month. Both facts are about the same election. One of them has a name attached. It is not the money.
In lieu of a subpoena, this office notes that the size of the disclosure gap and the size of the ballot-rejection gap are not required to match for the reconciliation to be complete. They only have to run in the same column, in the same season, and be counted by someone. They have been. The count is above. Nothing further to reconcile today, hon.
“They don't need your name to spend on the election, but they sure need it, signed twice, postmarked on time, or your vote doesn't count. The money that could swing the whole thing travels invisible and your one ballot gets bounced for being a day late — that's not an accident, that's the design.”
“Every dollar spent is fully compliant with disclosure law as written, and if the law doesn't require a name that's a feature, that's transparency working as intended, which, granted, doesn't sound like transparency, but the paperwork is in order. As for the ballots, the deadline is the deadline — we don't make exceptions, we just also don't make the mail faster.”
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.