WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld state laws that allow for counting mail ballots that are postmarked by election day but arrive later.
The 5-4 decision rejects a Republican challenge to laws in California and 13 other mostly Democratic states which permit the counting of these late-arriving ballots.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined with the three liberals to form the majority.
The decision is a mild surprise and should bolster Democrats in the fall election.
While California’s seven-day grace period for mail ballots has contributed to slow tabulations, it has not been shown to trigger fraud or unreliable vote counts.
Election law experts blame slow tallies on the surge in voting by mail combined with the need to carefully match signatures on these ballots.
The court said federal law since 1845 has set election day nationwide as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November and voters were required to cast their ballots that day.
Citing that fact, the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration joined a challenge to a Mississippi law adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic that allowed counting ballots that were up to five days late.
Trump’s lawyers said federal law preempted or overrode the state law.
“From the dawn of America, election day has meant the day the ballot box closes—and when election officials must be in receipt of all ballots,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.
Democrats said the Constitution says the “time, place and manner of holding elections” for Congress “shall be prescribed in each state” by its legislature. However, Congress was given the power to override those state rules and set its own regulations for federal elections.
While Congress could have prohibited the counting of late-arriving ballots, it had not done so. That may be so because states wanted to count ballots from members of the military stationed overseas even if they arrived late.
Last year, however, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans struck down Mississippi’s law that allowed for counting ballots that were cast by election day but arrived up to five days later.
The opinion by three judges, all Trump appointees, concluded that the election day set by Congress “is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.”
In its appeal, Mississippi stuck with a states’ rights view and argued that the federal election-day statutes mean that ballots must be cast — not received — by election day.
The post States may continue to count late-arriving mail ballots, Supreme Court rules appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
