Mail-In Ballot Case Makes Its Way to SCOTUS ahead of Midterms
The nation’s highest court will soon deliberate on an election case that could impact how over a dozen states count ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up the case of Watson v. Republican National Committee, centered on a challenge to a Mississippi state law permitting mail-in ballots received after election to be counted, provided that they were postmarked on or before Election Day.
“Like all other States, Mississippi requires that ballots for federal offices be cast — marked and submitted to election officials — by [Election] Day. And like most other States, Mississippi allows some of those timely cast ballots (mail-in absentee ballots, in Mississippi) to be counted if they are received by election officials soon after election day,” Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson (R) explained in his petition before the Supreme Court. Watson argued that Mississippi’s law, which allows for ballots received by mail and postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted by election officials for up to five business days after Election Day, does not conflict with federal election laws, which Watson says only stipulate when ballots are to be cast, not when they are to be counted.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, however, disagreed with Watson’s interpretation, determining that Mississippi’s law was in conflict with federal statutes governing elections. “For more than 150 years after the enactment of the first election-day statute, States complied with Congress’ mandate by ensuring that the ballot box closed on the federally mandated election day. With rare outliers, the States mandated that ballots must be received by election officials by election day,” the Republican National Committee (RNC) wrote in its challenge to Mississippi’s law. “But recently, an increasing number of States — including Mississippi — have deviated from that practice by permitting at least some ballots to be received after election day.”
“These States risk ‘the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.’ … They reduce the time to resolve postelection disputes. … And they deprive the electorate of a clear nationwide deadline that ‘puts all voters on the same footing,’” the RNC argued, citing Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “While the question in this case is important, this Court should decline review here because the Fifth Circuit answered it correctly,” the RNC added. “The Secretary asks this
Court to grant certiorari and draw a line between ‘casting’ ballots and receiving ballots by election officials. But that line was unknown at the time of the election-day statutes.”
Currently, Mississippi is one of 16 states that allows ballots received by mail after Election Day to be counted: Alaska, California, Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia, in addition to the District of Columbia and Guam, do the same. On Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch,” Conservative Partnership Institute Senior Legal Fellow and Election Integrity Network founder Cleta Mitchell explained that some states will keep counting ballots received up to two weeks after Election Day. “I will tell you that in the state where I live, North Carolina, they can accept ballots — it’s supposed to be only from the military, but they stop categorizing whether it’s military or non-military, and they just accept ballots,” she observed. “And in Pennsylvania, they have defended and started counting ballots with no postmark. So you don’t know if it’s postmarked before, you don’t know if it was sent before or after the election. So these are really big problems. I’m so glad the Supreme Court hopefully will say that.”
Mississippi originally approved its mail-in ballot law in response to COVID-19 but made the law permanent in 2024. Mitchell commented, “The Democrats and the Left took to heart what Rahm Emanuel famously said: ‘Never let an emergency go to waste.’ And so, they took the opportunity under COVID to completely upend America’s election laws in state after state after state.” She detailed, “Marc Elias and the constellation of left-wing, anti-integrity voting groups sued state after state to get rid of all the safeguards that have been protecting our elections for a century, really. And so, one of the ways that they did that was they had been moving to get states to accept ballots after Election Day.”
Mitchell also anticipated that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the issue will likely be handed down in time to set the standard for the 2026 midterm elections. “Arguments will be sometime between now and, say, the end of April, and the decision would come no later than June 30. So the decision will be made before the November 2026 election, and I just hope that they will uphold Election Day,” she posited. “The next thing we have to do is get states to stop having ‘election season,’” Mitchell added. “Some early voting, maybe seven days, maybe eight days, but having — like Virginia has 45 days of early voting. They started voting for the November election on September 19. It’s time to stop all that nonsense.”
AUTHOR
S.A. McCarthy
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
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