Crucial Quote
“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote for the court Monday, also noting that while federal law sets out a specific day for the Electoral College to vote for presidential elections, it doesn’t say anything about when votes should be received. “The Constitution thus envisions a system in which receipt of votes is necessarily divorced from voting,” Barrett added.
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Which States Does This Impact?
In addition to Mississippi, 13 states also broadly allow ballots to arrive a certain number of days after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked in time: Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia, along with Guam, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In addition to those states, a further 16 states allow overseas and military ballots specifically to arrive after Election Day: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Utah.
Chief Critic
Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented from the court’s opinion Monday, with Alito arguing the majority’s decision was “based on a flawed understanding of the election-day statutes” and federal law should block late-arriving ballots. Alito also sided with claims Republicans have made about laws on late-arriving ballots helping to enable fraud—which is already exceedingly rare with mail-in ballots—and argued laws on late-arriving ballots help “bad actors seeking to stuff ballot boxes when early election results suggest a tight race.” The court’s ruling “opens up and fails to resolve a host of questions for state election officials and courts,” Alito wrote. “And it creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government.”
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Key Background
The Supreme Court’s ruling comes after the high court previously sidestepped the issue of late-arriving ballots in 2020, allowing ballots to arrive after Election Day in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election but declining to take up the case for oral arguments and issue a broader ruling. The RNC’s challenge against Mississippi law is part of a broader effort by the GOP to oppose mail-in voting, despite the practice historically being used by many of the party’s voters. Trump started strongly attacking mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming the practice helped to enable fraud, which evidence does not support. He’s ramped up those attacks again ahead of the November midterm elections, and issued an executive order in March that targeted mail-in voting and asked agencies to create lists of voters eligible to receive ballots, and for the U.S. Postal Service to only deliver ballots to those voters. A federal judge blocked that order last week, however, though the Trump administration is likely to appeal it.
Further Reading
Poll: Most Americans Support Mail-In Voting Despite Trump’s ‘Scam’ Claim (Forbes)
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