Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.
California sends mail ballots to every registered voter and allows the counting of ballots postmarked by election day even if they arrive a week later. This process helps explain why the state's vote count is slow. Despite the total lack of evidence for significant cheating, the slow count gives Trumpists an occasion to spread lies about election fraud.
Just over four months before the 2026 midterm elections, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by, and received within five days of, Election Day. By a vote of 5-4, the justices in Watson v. Republican National Committee rejected an argument, made by the political parties and others challenging the law, that federal law requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day.
Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett concluded that “the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that “from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century—a period that spans the enactment of all three election-day statutes—having an ‘election’ on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day.”
Mississippi passed the law at the center of the dispute in 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, along with a Mississippi voter and a county election official, went to federal court in Gulfport, Mississippi, to challenge the post-election ballot deadline; the Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks later, which was combined with the first suit. They argued that Mississippi’s law clashes with a federal law, first passed by Congress in 1845, that designates the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the “election day.”
