The Fourth Circuit struck down South Carolina’s age-based absentee voting law. No county in the state has more riding on what happens next than Horry County.
On Aug. 18, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that South Carolina’s absentee-by-mail system is unconstitutional. The decision landed with almost no notice in the Grand Strand. Columbia television stations picked it up nearly two weeks later, on Aug. 31. Horry County’s own election office has said nothing publicly about it at all.
That silence is a problem, because of South Carolina’s 46 counties, Horry has more to lose — or gain — from this ruling than almost any of them.
This ruling has significant implications for absentee voting across the state.
Roughly 114,200 Horry County residents are 65 or older, about 27.6 percent of the population, compared with 19.7 percent statewide [U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2024; USAFacts, 2026]. Under the law the Fourth Circuit just invalidated, every one of those residents who is registered to vote has been able to request a mail ballot for any reason at all, no explanation required. Their neighbors under 65 have not.
A federal court has now said that arrangement violates the Constitution. What it has not said is which direction the fix goes regarding absentee voting.
What the court actually decided
The case is Grant v. Belangia, filed in December 2023 by a group of South Carolina voters — six of them, all under 65 — who argued that the state’s two-tier absentee system discriminated against them because of their age [WSPA, 2026]. Some of the plaintiffs are members of Charity Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston, led by longtime civil rights figure the Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III [Post and Courier, 2026].
U.S. District Judge Bruce Hendricks ruled for the state in March 2025. The plaintiffs appealed, and this time they won, unanimously.
Writing for the panel, Fourth Circuit Chief Judge Roger Gregory grounded the decision in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment — the 1971 amendment that lowered the voting age to 18 and, less famously, forbids abridging the right to vote on account of age. Gregory wrote that South Carolina “allocates voting opportunities unequally based solely on age” by giving voters 65 and up unconditional mail access while requiring everyone else to clear eligibility categories, paperwork and a firm deadline [Fox News, 2026]. The result, he wrote, is that voting is simply harder for people under 65 [Bloomberg Law, 2026].
Two details in the opinion matter more than the headline.
First, the panel did not hold that South Carolina must let everyone vote by mail. Gregory was explicit that states retain broad authority over election procedure, and that the state may pursue election-integrity goals through age-neutral rules or by restricting absentee voting more tightly across the board [Bloomberg Law, 2026]. The constitutional defect is the two tiers, not the existence of limits.
Second, the panel rejected the plaintiffs’ separate Equal Protection claim, agreeing with the lower court that age is not a suspect classification under Supreme Court precedent [WSPA, 2026]. The plaintiffs won on one theory and lost on the other — a distinction that will matter if this case climbs higher.
The panel sent the case back to Judge Hendricks to craft a remedy, offering him two options: extend no-excuse mail voting to voters under 65, or take it away from voters 65 and older [South Carolina Public Radio, 2026]. It also handed him the timing question, noting that changes made close to an election can create voter confusion [WSPA, 2026].
That remand is where Horry County’s interest becomes concrete.
Why the Grand Strand is the most exposed county in the state
The court’s two remedies are not symmetrical here. They are close to opposites.
If Hendricks levels up — extending no-excuse mail voting to everyone — Horry County’s election office in Conway inherits a workload it has never handled, in a county whose voter rolls have swelled alongside a population that grew 17.8 percent between 2020 and 2024 [U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, 2024].
If he levels down — stripping the over-65 exemption — Horry County absorbs the largest per-capita loss of voting convenience in South Carolina. More than a quarter of this county’s residents would go from needing no reason to vote by mail to needing one of a short list of qualifying excuses: employment conflicts, caring for someone sick or disabled, physical disability, military service, pretrial confinement, emergency hospitalization, or absence from the county during the entire early voting period and on Election Day [SC Election Commission, 2026].
Read that list again with the Grand Strand in mind. Several of those categories are still available to older voters who genuinely need them — disability in particular. But a healthy 72-year-old in Carolina Forest or Murrells Inlet who simply prefers to vote from the kitchen table would no longer qualify. Neither would the snowbird who is here in November but registered elsewhere, or the seasonal resident whose travel doesn’t happen to span the full early voting window.
There is a counterweight worth naming honestly. South Carolina adopted two weeks of no-excuse early in-person voting in 2022, and the same law eliminated in-person absentee voting [Sumter Item, 2024]. Nobody in this county is being cut off from voting. Armand Derfner, the Charleston attorney representing the plaintiffs, anticipated that argument and pushed back on it: the issue, he says, is that a system treating some voters better than others is still discrimination when the right at stake is the right to vote [Live 5 News, 2026].
Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, who worked on the case, framed South Carolina’s position more bluntly — most states permitting broad absentee voting don’t sort voters by age [Post and Courier, 2026].
Columbia has already tipped its hand
Here is the part Horry County’s older voters should read closely.
State Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms, who authored South Carolina’s early voting law, has said that if courts force age-neutral rules, the Legislature should scrap no-excuse mail voting altogether rather than extend it. Letting anyone vote by mail for any reason, he argued, would be the worst available option because it would weaken the state’s control over the ballot process [Post and Courier, 2026].
That is a legitimate position, argued by the legislator with the most credibility on the subject. It is also, in practical terms, a proposal to solve a constitutional problem created for younger voters by taking something away from older ones — and Horry County has more older voters, proportionally, than the Charleston-area district Campsen represents.
The South Carolina Election Commission, for its part, has said only that absentee rules have not changed and that it doesn’t comment on pending litigation [WIS, 2026]. Attorneys for the state have signaled they intend to appeal further [Fox News, 2026].
They have grounds to try. The Fourth Circuit acknowledged that the Fifth and Seventh Circuits reached the opposite conclusion on similar laws, and said flatly that those courts applied the wrong analysis [Bloomberg Law, 2026]. A genuine circuit split is the single most reliable way to attract the U.S. Supreme Court’s attention, which means this fight may not end in Columbia at all.
One clarification, because the case name will confuse people locally: the “Belangia” in Grant v. Belangia is Conway Belangia, the executive director of the State Election Commission, who was appointed in March 2026 after 34 years running Greenville County’s elections [SC Election Commission, 2026]. He is named as the state’s chief election official. Despite the first name, he has no connection to the city of Conway or to Horry County’s election office.
What this means for Nov. 3 — and for January
Nothing changes for this year’s general election. The Election Commission says the rules stand, the case is back before a district judge who has been told to weigh timing carefully, and the courts have a well-established reluctance to rewrite voting procedures within weeks of an election [WIS, 2026]. If you are 65 or older in Horry County, your mail ballot works exactly the way it always has this November.
The real decision point is early 2027, when the General Assembly returns. Lawmakers can wait for Hendricks to impose a remedy, or they can write their own — and the second option is the one that decides whether Horry County’s seniors keep the convenience they’ve had for decades.
That makes this a question for the Horry County legislative delegation, not an abstraction happening in Richmond and Charleston. Nobody in the delegation has publicly staked out a position. Given that better than one in four of their constituents is directly affected, that’s a question worth asking each of them before the session opens — and worth remembering how they answer.
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Further Reading
absentee voting – South Carolina Public Radio — “Federal appeals court finds SC absentee voting law is unconstitutional”: https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/sc-news/2026-09-01/federal-appeals-court-finds-sc-absentee-voting-law-is-unconstitutional
absentee voting – WSPA (Spartanburg) — Detailed breakdown of the ruling and the remedy options: https://www.wspa.com/news/federal-court-rules-south-carolina-absentee-voting-law-unconstitutional/
absentee voting – Bloomberg Law — “South Carolina Vote-by-Mail Restrictions Deemed Unconstitutional,” including the circuit split: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/south-carolina-vote-by-mail-restrictions-deemed-unconstitutional
absentee voting – The Post and Courier — Legislative reaction, plaintiff background, and Campsen’s position: https://www.postandcourier.com/politics/sc-mail-in-absentee-voting-unconstitutional/article_d525979c-46bb-48fb-8e73-d8bcabb5996f.html
absentee voting – Reason / Volokh Conspiracy — Excerpts from Judge Gregory’s opinion in Grant v. Belangia: https://reason.com/volokh/2026/08/19/fourth-circuit-concludes-south-carolina-cannot-limit-no-excuse-absentee-ballots-to-those-over-65/
absentee voting – Justia Verdict — Prof. Vikram Amar’s legal analysis of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment reasoning: https://verdict.justia.com/2026/08/24/bipartisan-panel-of-fourth-circuit-judges-reaches-the-right-result-for-the-right-reasons-in-twenty-sixth-amendment-case-grant-v-belangia-setting-up-possible-supreme-court-review-of-a-circuit-spli
absentee voting – WIS (Columbia) — What the ruling means for voters before November: https://www.wistv.com/2026/08/31/federal-court-rules-scs-age-based-absentee-voting-law-unconstitutional/
absentee voting – Fox News — State’s plan to appeal further: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/south-carolina-mail-in-voting-law-illegally-discriminates-appeals-court-rules
absentee voting – SC Election Commission — Current absentee voting rules and qualifying excuses: https://scvotes.gov/voters/absentee-voting/
absentee voting – Horry County Voter Registration & Elections — Local absentee information, 1515 4th Ave., Conway: https://www.horrycountysc.gov/departments/voters-registration-and-elections/
