The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, preserving rules that had been challenged in Mississippi. Amy Coney Barrett wrote the 5-4 majority opinion, and the result keeps current ballot-counting deadlines in place for nearly 30 states.
The ruling covers states that let mailed ballots arrive and be counted after Election Day if they are postmarked by Election Day. In just over half of those states, the longer deadline applies only to military and overseas voters, so the decision preserves a narrower rule in those places and a broader one elsewhere.
Mississippi law
The case came from Mississippi, where a law allowed ballots to be counted if they arrived within five business days of the election and carried an Election Day postmark. The federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down that law before the Supreme Court reversed the decision, and John Roberts joined Barrett and the three liberal justices in the majority.
The court heard arguments in March and resolved a dispute over whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials. Barrett’s opinion answered that question by allowing states to keep the post-Election Day counting windows already on the books.
Trump challenge
The ruling rejected a Republican-led attack brought in Mississippi against Donald Trump’s Republican administration and the Republican and Libertarian parties. Trump has repeatedly attacked most mail balloting and has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 “resulted from fraud,” even though his own attorney general said that argument had no merit.
The decision avoids last-minute changes to state election procedures just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections. For voters in the states covered by these rules, mailed ballots that are postmarked by Election Day can still be counted under the deadlines their states already use, rather than under a single nationwide receipt cutoff.
The remaining dispute is the legal reasoning behind the 5-4 split. Barrett wrote for the majority, but the ruling leaves the court’s internal lines visible: Roberts and the three liberal justices joined her, while the dissent did not persuade enough of the court to impose a single receipt deadline.
