Judge blocks Trump's mail rule fourth time in two weeks; North Carolina tightens its own hours earlier.

…(cont) I had it written down somewhere — hold on, here it is. August 26th, a judge in Boston clears the way, lets the Postal Service go ahead with the new rule. Two days later, the 28th, same judge, blocks it again — fourteen days this time, no half-measures. A group called Common Dreams ran the headline "Trump Must Keep His Hands Off Our Elections" on that one — I'm just reading that back, not my words. Same day as that ruling, the Justice Department files its appeal. Now it's September, blocked a fourth time, with an appeal sitting up at the Supreme Court. Four rulings. Two weeks. One rule. Does that count match what you read this week?

So here's my question, plain as I can put it: if a federal judge keeps stopping a rule meant to tighten who can mail in a ballot, what happens to the mail ballots while all that stopping is going on?

Because down in North Carolina, hours before the state became the first in the country to start sending ballots out, its elections board voted — straight down party lines — to tighten its own rules on which absentee ballots get thrown out for errors. Not the federal rule the judge keeps blocking. A state one, passed by the state's own board, in effect before a single envelope left the building.

I used to keep time for a living, more or less — not elections, tolls, years of them, sitting in that little booth with the heater that never worked right. You learn which plaza backs up at eight and clears by nine, and you learn to roll through at eight fifty-nine so the arm's still up when you get there. Nobody's breaking any law doing that. You're just reading the schedule better than whoever's trying to slow you down.

Excuse me — before you go, I want to come back to something, and I'm sorry, I know I already used the word once. Not hours, exactly, this time — call it the gap. The same gap I was talking about with North Carolina's vote, the one sitting between the tightening and the trucks pulling out of the loading dock. That gap is the whole story here, isn't it. A federal court can spend two weeks and four rulings closing a door on one rule. A state board needs about as much time as it takes to drive up to a toll plaza to open the same door on its own.

So which timeline actually reached the ballots first — the court's, or the board's?

—Lou