The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether Mississippi and nearly 30 other states can continue counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. The Republican National Committee, backed by the Trump administration, is urging the justices to strike down Mississippi's ballot-receipt law as unconstitutional. The stakes are enormous, and the timing is no accident: the 2026 midterms are months away.
At the center of the dispute is a Mississippi law enacted in 2020 that permits absentee ballots to be counted so long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and received by the registrar no more than five business days after the election. Nearly 30 states and the District of Columbia maintain similar provisions allowing at least some ballots cast by Election Day to be counted if received shortly afterward.
The RNC's position is straightforward: Congress mandated nearly 200 years ago that federal elections be held uniformly on one Tuesday in November every other year. That means Election Day is a deadline, not a suggestion.
U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer, writing for the government, framed the argument with characteristic precision.
Elections have consequences. They also have a definition. And 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.
According to Courthouse News, the RNC pressed further in its brief, arguing that federal election-day statutes govern when states must conclude the public process of voting, not merely when voters must make their choices.
The secretary can't avoid that statutory text and context by reframing the issue around 'ballot casting' in whatever way state law chooses.
Mississippi fired back with a different reading of the law. In its filing, the state argued that federal statutes require ballots to be cast, not received, by Election Day.
The voters make that choice by casting their ballots. So federal law requires only that voters cast their ballots by Election Day. The election has then occurred, even if state officials do not receive all ballots by that day.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson gave voice last month to the frustration that has driven this case to the high court. Johnson pointed to the pattern of post-Election Day ballot counting that has repeatedly erased Republican leads.
We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost, and no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts.
Johnson added bluntly: "It just looks on its face to be fraudulent." He conceded that he had no evidence of fraud, but the pattern he described is exactly the kind of structural vulnerability that invites suspicion. When every late-arriving batch of ballots breaks the same direction, the system itself is the problem, whether or not any individual ballot is fraudulent.
Opponents of the RNC's position leaned heavily on logistical concerns. A group of local election officials told the court that requiring all mail-in ballots to be processed by the close of Election Day would create chaos.
Local election officials would need to process thousands of ballots in an extremely short timeframe. Simultaneously, they would need to contend with longer lines at in-person voting sites when voters who realize that (or are simply concerned that) their mail-in ballots will not be received by election officials on Election Day flock to the polls to vote in person.
Local officials said that for the 2024 general election, Mississippi alone would have had to process and adjudicate nearly 200,000 mail-in ballots received before Election Day, along with likely thousands more arriving on Election Day itself, all by 11:59 p.m. Over 13 million Californians and nearly 700,000 Nevadans voted by mail in 2024, and officials said it would be impossible for those states to process all ballots by the end of Election Day.
A separate group of former election administrators warned the court that striking down laws like Mississippi's would produce a system that is "more expensive, more confusing, more chaotic, and, ultimately, less reliable."
These are real operational concerns. But the Constitution does not bend to administrative convenience. If election offices cannot process mail-in ballots on time, the answer is to fix the processing pipeline or limit the volume of mail-in ballots, not to stretch Election Day into Election Week.
This fight has been building for years. In 2020, the Supreme Court split over a similar Pennsylvania statute that counted absentee ballots received within three days after Election Day, even without a postmark. Texas subsequently filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, which the Supreme Court rejected.
Nearly six years ago, the court refused to review post-election ballot receipt deadlines. That refusal left the legal question unresolved and allowed the patchwork of state laws to persist. Now, with the case finally on the docket, the justices have a chance to establish a uniform constitutional rule before November.
President Trump has not been quiet about it. Upon returning to office in 2025, he issued an executive order seeking to invalidate absentee or mail-in ballots received after Election Day. He has also pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would end the use of nearly all mail-in ballots and require additional identification documents such as a passport or birth certificate. House Republicans narrowly passed the SAVE America Act last month, and lawmakers are pushing through procedural hurdles this week to put the bill up for a final Senate vote, though the legislation would require major rule changes to pass that chamber.
The court will not rule on Monday. But the arguments will reveal how the justices read the federal election-day statutes and whether they view the word "election" as encompassing ballot receipt or only ballot casting. If the court sides with the RNC and the Trump administration, laws in roughly 30 states would be on constitutionally thin ice heading into the midterms. If Mississippi prevails, the post-Election Day counting window survives, and the only path to reform runs through Congress.
For six years, the court dodged this question. In that time, mail-in voting exploded, post-Election Day counting became routine, and public confidence in the process cratered. Congress set Election Day for a reason. Monday, the Supreme Court finally gets to say whether that day still means something.
