WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted up to five days after the polls close, handing Democrats a massive win heading into the midterm elections.
The 5-4 ruling saw Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Amy Coney Barrett side with their liberal peers in concluding that nothing in federal law requires all ballots to be collected by Election Day.
“The Framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election laws ‘applicable to every probable change in the situation of the country,’” Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “So instead of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that ‘a discretionary power over election’ needed to be lodged ‘somewhere.’”
“Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged in this Court. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”
The case, Watson v. RNC, stemmed from a 2024 lawsuit by the Republican National Committee and several local parties against the Magnolia State over its five-day grace period.
At least 13 other states have similar post-Election Day counting laws on their books, while nearly 30 states give certain types of mail-in voters some extra time to turn in their ballots. California is perhaps the most infamous of those states, with many key races unsettled for more than a week after polls close.
“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote. “The most recent amendment to the Presidential election-day statute bears this out. In 2022, Congress inserted the phrase ‘election day’ into that statute and marked that day as a specific Tuesday. It then created an exception: When States ‘modif[y] the period of voting.’”
“That Congress defined ‘election day’ with reference to ‘voting’ indicates that ‘voting’ is the act governed by the statute.”
President Trump has long been a fierce critic of states that allow the late counting of ballots and the Justice Department backed the RNC suit.
During oral arguments in March, the justices appeared deeply divided and grappled with concerns about whether nixing Mississippi’s policy could threaten the practice of early voting altogether.
“It just seems inconceivable that on the basis of this kind of evidence, we would reject these practices that are so entrenched in 30 states,” liberal Justice Elena Kagan said at one point.
Kagan’s fellow liberal, Ketanji Brown Jackson, had attempted to nudge her colleagues away from siding against Mississippi, telling attorneys for the RNC: “The worry is that you want this court to decide the case rather than have Congress do it.”
Four conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh — dissented, with Alito underscoring in his written opinion that federal law sets Election Day as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.”
“If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated,” he wrote.
Alito also criticized the majority opinion for concluding that federal law merely requires an “individual cast a vote on or before election day.”
“But if that is all that the election-day statutes require, there is no sense in which the electorate as a whole can be seen as making its choice on election day,” he contended.
Monday’s decision comes as Trump has pressed Congress to tighten restrictions on mail-in ballots and enact a proof of citizenship requirement to vote in federal elections.
Trump has specifically called for the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which has been stuck in the Senate.
“If we want fair and secure elections, Election Day should mean exactly what it says, which is why this decision makes it even more imperative that Congress pass the SAVE America Act,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement.
“Democrats are inviting chaos at the ballot box by allowing elections to drag on for days and weeks after voters cast their ballots. Republicans are not going to be deterred by this decision, and the RNC will keep fighting to have elections end on Election Day as Americans want.”
