The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Mississippi can continue to count some absentee ballots received after Election Day, rejecting a Republican challenge contending that those votes are invalid under federal law.
The 5-4 opinion, which was written by one of President Donald Trump’s appointees and joined by the court’s three liberals, delivers a blow to ongoing efforts by Trump and the GOP to curtail mail-in voting ahead of the midterms.
“Mississippi is one of roughly 30 States that count at least some absentee ballots mailed by election day but received afterward,” the majority noted in the ruling.
Trump lamented the legal defeat in a Truth Social post that urged Republicans to pass a controversial election bill that he has aggressively pushed.
“In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that ‘people’s’ votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump wrote.
At the White House later Monday, Trump called the Supreme Court ruling “a little bit surprising,” claiming it “gives people more time to vote illegally.”
“I think it was very detrimental to honest elections, but it is what it is,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Trump regularly, and without providing evidence, amplifies allegations that U.S. elections have been corrupted by large-scale voter fraud.
Mississippi’s election law allows absentee voters, including seniors and college students, to cast their ballots by mail so long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and received no more than five days afterward. The change, made in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, passed nearly unanimously in Mississippi’s legislature and was signed into law by Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican.
The Republican National Committee sued in 2024, arguing that the wording of federal election statutes indicates that Election Day itself is the deadline for when ballots can be received.
But the Supreme Court disagreed.
“The federal election-day statutes do not prevent Mississippi from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days thereafter,” the court held. “Nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day.”
The outcome was a surprise to some who believed the court was poised to overturn Mississippi’s law.
“The importance of this case cannot be overstated,” said Elisabeth Frost, litigation chair of Elias Law Group, which represented Mississippi in the case.
The Supreme Court affirmed “a simple principle: a lawful ballot cast on time should be counted,” Frost said in a statement. “It rejected the RNC’s radical attempt to rewrite election laws in a way that would have resulted in the rejection of hundreds of thousands of ballots and the disenfranchisement of voters nationwide through no fault of their own.”
The ruling came as Trump, facing the prospect of Democrats gaining majorities in one or both chambers of Congress after the November midterms, has made changing election rules a top priority for Republican lawmakers.
He is demanding that Congress pass the SAVE America Act, a controversial bill that purports to crack down on noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, which is already federally illegal and rarely occurs. The bill would impose nationwide rules limiting mail-in voting and requiring proof of citizenship for voters, among other provisions.
Last week, Trump abruptly cancelled the signing of a landmark bipartisan housing bill, saying he would refuse to make it law “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
At the White House on Monday afternoon, Trump repeated his view that Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., should fire the Senate parliamentarian to clear the way for the GOP to pass the election bill by including it as part of a budget reconciliation package.
That maneuver could skirt the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule, allowing Republicans to approve the bill without needing Democrats’ help. But the budget reconciliation process involves an array of limits and restrictions, and it’s far from clear if any version of the election bill would make it through intact.
Thune has already said he will not fire the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, despite pressure from Trump. Thune has also refused Trump’s calls to change the legislative filibuster rules.
What’s more, a handful of Senate Republicans have already signaled opposition to the SAVE America Act — a fact that Trump seemed to acknowledge could pose an insurmountable hurdle.
“I’d like to have the Save America Act added on, [but] that’s probably not going to happen, because we have four Republican senators, maybe five, that just won’t vote for it,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
The Trump administration had filed a court brief backing the RNC’s lawsuit against Mississippi, and U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer represented the federal government in oral arguments before the justices in March.
In Monday’s ruling, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump nominated to the bench in 2020, bluntly rejected arguments that federal election laws supersede Mississippi’s statute permitting late-arriving absentee ballots.
“We must decide whether the federal election-day statutes preempt Mississippi’s law,” she wrote for the majority. “They do not.”
The opinion reversed a prior decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which ruled that Mississippi’s acceptance of late ballots violates federal law.
Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that by counting late-arriving ballots, Mississippi “effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement.”
Alito’s dissent was endorsed by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and joined in part by Brett Kavanaugh.