The Supreme Court on Monday upheld state laws that let election officials count mail ballots arriving after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day, turning back a Republican-backed challenge to the practice.
The ruling leaves intact laws used by more than a dozen states that give officials a window after Election Day to receive and count ballots that were mailed in time.
The challengers had argued the practice runs afoul of federal law setting a single, uniform Election Day in November. The Court was not persuaded. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices to form the majority.
The decision reaches a specific category of state law: those requiring late-arriving ballots to carry a postmark on or before Election Day. That is the rule in the great majority of states that allow a grace period at all.
Barrett, who wrote the opinion, located the holding in something modest and old.
The Framers, she noted, understood they could not write rules for every situation the country might someday face, so rather than freezing election law into the Constitution, they parked the discretion somewhere it could be used. Just not here. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose, she wrote. The power to fill that silence, she made plain, was lodged with Congress and the states, not the Court.
Her reasoning ran along a clean seam. Federal law requires voters to make their choice on Election Day, and Mississippi honors that: Election Day is the deadline to vote. What the statutes do not do is set a deadline for when a ballot must arrive. The election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, Barrett wrote, so nothing in them stops Mississippi from counting a ballot postmarked in time but delivered a few days later.
Justice Samuel Alito did not see it that way.
In dissent, he warned that the decision creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government. It was the language of a man worried less about statutory text than about what ordinary people will believe when ballots keep arriving after the votes are supposed to be in.
The political response came fast.
President Trump called the ruling a tremendous loss for voters’ rights and pressed Congress to act, saying it is more important than ever to pass the SAVE America Act.
He wants every voter required to show photo ID and proof of citizenship, with mail-in voting pared back to the traditional exceptions and a handful of unusual circumstances. The decision, he noted, lets ballots postmarked by Election Day be counted as much as five days later.
NEW: President Trump is urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act after calling the Supreme Court's ruling mail-in ballots a "tremendous loss" for voters' rights. The ruling allows mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive up to five days later to be… pic.twitter.com/8cgSlXONDj
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