WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling Monday allowing states to accept and count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, dealing a blow to a challenge championed by President Donald Trump.
The decision turned back a Republican-driven legal effort aimed at laws in more than half the country’s states and the District of Columbia. Those laws allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive a certain number of days after the election, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. By upholding those laws, the court spares election officials from having to rewrite their rules just months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
It’s worth noting that in just over half of the states with these extended deadlines, the more lenient rules apply only to ballots submitted by military personnel and voters living overseas.
The legal fight is one piece of Trump’s larger campaign against mail-in voting, which he has repeatedly claimed is ripe for fraud — a position that runs counter to substantial evidence and the track record of many states that have used mail voting for years. Trump has also continued to insist his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud, despite more than 60 court rulings and a finding by his own attorney general that those claims had no legal basis.
The Supreme Court took up the case after hearing oral arguments in March. The dispute originated in Mississippi and placed the state in opposition to Trump’s Republican administration, as well as the Republican and Libertarian parties. The central legal question was whether federal law — by establishing a single Election Day — requires that ballots be both cast by voters and physically received by election officials on that same day.
Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, a federal appeals court based in New Orleans had struck down a Mississippi law that allowed ballots to be counted if they arrived within five business days after the election, provided they carried an Election Day postmark.
