North Carolina board adopts the mail-ballot rule federal courts keep blocking, hours before ballots go out

…(cont) I wanted to walk through how it got there, because I wrote some of the dates down on the back of a receipt from the corner store and then couldn't read my own handwriting, so bear with me.

On August 26th, the Supreme Court lifted an earlier block on this same Postal Service rule — six to three, on standing, meaning the states suing didn't have the right kind of injury to sue with. Two days later, a judge in Boston put a block back on. The Washington Examiner, writing about the Justice Department's appeal that same week, called it her second block on the rule. Then on September 1st, a whistleblower complaint reached a senator's desk saying the Postal Service had rushed the verification system the rule depends on — rushed it while the administration was already asking a federal appeals court for permission to use it anyway. And Friday, that second block got turned into a preliminary injunction, the New York Post reported, replacing the temporary one that came before it.

I keep thinking about the toll plaza on the way to my brother's, the one that props the E-ZPass lane open an extra hour whenever there's construction. They don't build a new lane for that. They leave the one lane propped open a little longer so the backup doesn't reach the bridge.

So that's the lane — propped open, in Boston, as of Friday. Here's what I didn't expect, sitting outside the garage with this ballot request on my lap.

Hours before North Carolina became the first state in the country to start mailing these things out, its elections board — Republican majority, voting along party lines, per the Washington Examiner — approved its own rule directing county officials to reject certain absentee ballots for certain errors. Not the federal rule. A state rule. Voted in that same Friday, hours before the ballot trucks left.

I'm sorry to keep circling back to that word — the one about things kept going instead of built new — but there's a difference between propping a gate open and building a second gate beside it. Boston's gate is still propped. North Carolina's board built its own, on its own letterhead, on its own vote, the same week.

Excuse me — before you lick that envelope — does the injunction covering the U.S. Postal Service's rule reach a rule a state elections board wrote and passed itself, on its own schedule? The Boston order blocks a federal list-and-verify system. It doesn't mention North Carolina's board. It doesn't have to.

I've still got the ballot request on the car seat. I'll fill it out tonight. I just don't know yet which gate it's going through — the one that's propped, or the one that opened hours before I got it in the mail, the request.