From today’s New York Times:
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Mississippi’s grace period for late-arriving mail-in ballots, rejecting a push by the Trump administration to invalidate a state law.
The ruling means Mississippi’s law, which allows elections officials to count ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to five business days later, will remain in place, at least through the midterm elections.
In a 5-to-4 vote, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in supporting the state law. The majority found that nothing in federal statutes required ballots to be received by Election Day.
Although the decision focused on a challenge to Mississippi’s law, the ruling appeared to leave in place similar laws in at least 18 other states and territories, including 2026 battleground districts in Nevada and California, in a blow to Republican efforts to roll back mail-in balloting.
It is also a defeat for President Trump, who has long criticized voting by mail, falsely claiming that the practice is open to fraud and helped lead to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
On social media, Mr. Trump called the ruling a “tremendous loss.” He used the court’s decision to push Congress to pass his priority voting legislation, known as the SAVE America Act, saying it was “more important than ever” for lawmakers to act. The contentious measure would put in place restrictions on mail-in ballots and add new voter identification requirements.
The state law at issue was adopted by Mississippi’s Republican-led legislature during the pandemic. But the Republican National Committee and Mississippi’s state G.O.P. later challenged the measure in court, arguing that federal law sets out Election Day as the day that ballots should be considered final.
Writing for the majority, Justice Barrett described the court’s decision as a narrow one, focused solely on the question of whether states could enact laws providing grace periods for late-arriving ballots to be counted.
Read the complete story here.