People gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, on March 14, 2026.
Will Dunham | Reuters
Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday expressed skepticism about a Republican-challenged Mississippi law that allows a five-day grace period to count mail-in ballots received after Election Day, saying it could lead to stricter voting rules nationwide.
Republican President Donald Trump’s administration has argued in favor of a challenge to a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots sent by certain voters to be counted if they are postmarked on or before Election Day and are received up to five business days after a federal election. Absentee voting by mail is limited by law to a few categories of voters, including the elderly, people with disabilities and people living far from home.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Mississippi’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that ruled its mail-in voting law illegal. The dispute centered on whether federal law setting voting dates for federal elections overrides state laws that allow ballots to be accepted after Election Day.
U.S. Attorney General D. John Sauer, arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, criticized Mississippi’s law as being unduly “general and permissive.”
“Official receipt is central to the definition of ‘election,'” Sauer said, referring to receipt of ballots.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Questions raised by some of the conservative justices during arguments appeared to express concerns about broader mail-in voting practices beyond the grace period, including who can receive a ballot, whether ballots must be postmarked, and even whether states will allow voters to recall mail-in ballots.
President Trump made it clear last year that he intended to end the use of mail-in voting nationwide before the US midterm elections in November 2026, a move that would likely unfairly benefit his party, given that Democratic voters are traditionally more likely to vote by mail than Republican voters.
Bills currently being considered in Congress would place new restrictions on mail-in voting, including certain government-issued photo ID requirements. But President Trump urged Senate Republicans to expand the proposal to include a complete ban on mail-in voting, with some exceptions, including military personnel.
Republicans are skeptical of mail-in voting. Evidence of voter fraud is rare, but President Trump sought to cast doubt on the security of these ballots. President Trump continues to falsely claim that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
About 30 states and the District of Columbia accept at least some ballots postmarked on or before Election Day that are received afterward.
“There is a contradiction.”
During arguments, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch pressed Mississippi’s defense attorney, Scott Stewart, to clarify his position on when ballots were delivered to the state and who should receive them.
“You’re saying that federal law requires voters to submit their ballots to election officials, and they have to be in the mail by Election Day. … But at the same time, you’re also saying that you don’t actually have to submit your ballot to an election official; you just need to submit it to a common carrier. And there’s a contradiction there,” Gorsuch said.
The Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in 2024 seeking to invalidate the Mississippi law.
Absentee ballots are being prepared to be mailed on September 17, 2024 at the Wake County Board of Elections in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Alison Joyce | Getty Images
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan suggested to attorney Paul Clement, arguing on behalf of challengers to the Mississippi law, that the structure of key federal election laws likely reflects Congress’s view that states have flexibility in setting deadlines for receiving ballots.
Kagan said Congress seemed to believe that setting deadlines for receiving ballots was “a national responsibility.” “So they created a statute where each state would set its own receipt deadline for all elections.”
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito asked Stewart to address concerns that large numbers of mail-in ballots arriving after Election Day could undermine confidence in the integrity of the election.
“Do you think it’s legitimate to take into account that Congress enacted the Election Day Ordinance to combat fraud and fraud?” Alito asked. “Part of the brief[filed with the Supreme Court in this case]argues that confidence in the election results could be seriously undermined if the apparent outcome of an election the day after polls closed was fundamentally upended by the acceptance of a large number of ballots that later overturned the election.”
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Stewart to address whether historical practice supports a stricter deadline.
“The other side’s argument is that systems that allow mailing by Election Day have only become popular in recent years, and that the historical practice you cite was until recently an approach that required pick-up by Election Day,” Kavanaugh said. What should we think about that?
The Republican-controlled Mississippi Legislature passed the law on a bipartisan basis in 2020 during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.
In 2024, the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of the Republican challenger.
Although the Fifth Circuit case applied only to three states over which the district court of appeals has jurisdiction: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, it called into question the voting practices of other states with similar mail-in voting policies.
