Court: South Carolina Mail-Vote Age Rule Unconstitutional
Court: South Carolina Mail-Vote Age Rule Unconstitutional
The News
The ruling
A federal appeals court has held that South Carolina violates the Constitution by letting voters 65 and older cast absentee ballots by mail without giving a reason while requiring everyone younger to produce an excuse.
The disposition is narrower than "struck down." The district court's own docket records the outcome as: "Decision of Appeals Court: Reversed in part, Affirmed in part, and Remanded," entered Aug. 18, 2026. Judge Roger L. Gregory wrote the opinion, joined by Judges Pamela Harris and Julius Richardson. Democracy Docket, which covers election litigation, describes the panel as one Obama appointee, one Trump appointee and one George W. Bush appointee, and the holding as unanimous.
What the court decided
The plaintiffs — five registered South Carolina voters under 65 — argued the state's absentee scheme abridged their right to vote on account of age under the 26th Amendment, and separately discriminated against them under the Equal Protection Clause. The panel accepted the first theory and did not adopt the second.
The panel did not announce a constitutional right to vote by mail. Its holding, as summarized in a legal analysis of the opinion published by CaseMine, is that once a state offers a voting method, it may not ration access to that method on a ground the 26th Amendment forbids.
Timeline
The decision came from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Aug. 18, 2026, in a published opinion captioned Trudy B. Grant, et al. v. Conway Belangia, et al., No. 25-1413. The case is docketed in the trial court as Grant v. Knapp, No. 2:23-cv-06838 (D.S.C.).
Reactions
"Construing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in harmony with the Constitution's other voting rights amendments, we find that the unequal allocation of voting access based on age constitutes an abridgement of Plaintiffs' right to vote," the judges wrote, as quoted by Democracy Docket.
On the burden itself: "These additional conditions, barriers, and unequal prerequisites make it meaningfully harder for Plaintiffs to vote as compared to voters aged sixty-five and older, and they are more than sufficient to constitute an abridgment that violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment."
What's Next
The remedy is not settled — and could cut either way
The Fourth Circuit sent the case back to the district court to pick a fix, and it named two options: "either extending the benefit of 'no excuse' absentee-by-mail voting to voters under age sixty-five, or removing the benefit provided to voters age sixty-five and older."
That second option matters. A ruling reported as a win for younger voters could end with older South Carolinians losing no-excuse mail voting instead of younger ones gaining it. Nothing in the appellate decision requires the expansion.
What is not known
The Frank has not seen a filing showing whether South Carolina officials will seek rehearing before the full Fourth Circuit or petition the Supreme Court, and no deadline for either step has been confirmed here. Nor has the district court set a schedule on remand.
More
Under South Carolina law, voters 65 and up may vote absentee by mail with no excuse. Younger voters must fit an enumerated category — physically disabled or caring for someone who is, out of state on Election Day, confined, or unable to get to the polls because of work, which requires an employer's certification.
The equal-protection claim went the other way. Per that same analysis of the opinion, the court held strict scrutiny is unavailable because Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents forecloses treating age as a suspect classification, and it declined to revisit the district court's rational-basis and Anderson-Burdick analyses because the plaintiffs did not press those standards on appeal.
A circuit split
The Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion on a similar Texas law in 2020, and the Seventh Circuit upheld an Indiana absentee statute in 2023. The Fourth Circuit expressly rejected their reading of the 26th Amendment. Democracy Docket notes the split raises the odds the Supreme Court takes up the question.
How it got here
The suit was filed in December 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina before Judge Bruce Howe Hendricks, who granted summary judgment to the election commissioners in March 2025. The plaintiffs appealed. Bloomberg Law reports the voters are represented by Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School, Derfner & Altman and Brazil & Dunn; the South Carolina Election Commission by Burr & Forman and in-house counsel.
This is not the Postal Service case
Read this one on its own. It concerns a South Carolina state statute and the 26th Amendment. It has nothing to do with the separate fight in Massachusetts federal court over the U.S. Postal Service's mail-ballot rule and President Trump's executive order, which turns on federal agency authority and is before a different judge in a different circuit.
Sourcing: the case number, caption and date are taken from the appellate opinion as filed as an exhibit in an unrelated Fourth Circuit matter and posted by Carolina Journal; the disposition line is the U.S. District Court for South Carolina's docket entry of Aug. 18, 2026, as reproduced by CourtListener. Quotations from the opinion and the panel's composition are as reported by Democracy Docket. The equal-protection analysis is from CaseMine's commentary on the opinion. Counsel are per Bloomberg Law. The Frank did not obtain the opinion PDF directly from the Fourth Circuit's own site.
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