Maeve Bidonde, Staff Writer
On November 10th, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether or not states can count late mail-in ballots, which have been in President Trump’s crosshairs since he started his second term. According to AP News, the appeal came from Mississippi after a panel of three President Trump-nominated judges in the 5th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals said that counting late mail-in ballots that arrive not long after election day violated federal law.
Mississippi is one of 16 states that allow late mail-in ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by election day. 14 additional states allow late mail-in ballots from eligible voters, like service members stationed overseas and their families, to be counted.
The case will be argued in the late winter to early spring, but a decision can be expected soon enough to govern how the 2026 midterm Congressional elections are voted for and counted. The Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who happens to be Republican, was concerned that the ruling “will have destabilizing nationwide ramifications” if it is allowed to stand. Fitch wrote, “The stakes are high: ballots cast by — but received after — election day can swing close races and change the course of the country.”
The Supreme Court is also separately debating a case brought by Representative Mike Bost of Illinois that would challenge Illinois’s ballot receipt rule, and the case is backed by the Trump Administration. The heart of the case is whether or not Bost has the right to sue as a Congressman.
Other Republican states like Kansas and North Dakota have taken similar action to stop late ballot counting rules. In Ohio, legislation requiring mail-in ballots to be received by election day is being advanced as it has passed through the Senate.
According to CNN one of the battleground states, Nevada, allows late mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked on or before election day. Most of the other battleground states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, require ballots to be received by election day to be counted in an election.
Questioning ballots that weren’t counted until after election day was part of Trump’s argument to delegitimize the 2020 election that he lost to Biden. The question for this case is about mail-in ballots that are received after election day, not ballots that are received on or before election day but not counted until later on in the process. This case is one of many on the Supreme Court docket this year involving voting and the laws surrounding it.
In written arguments to the Supreme Court, the RNC said, “With rare outliers, the states mandated that ballots must be received by election officials by election day, 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.” The case will determine how voting happens in Mississippi for those who rely on mail-in ballots to enact their right to vote.
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