The US Supreme Court has ruled that states may count postal ballots that arrive after election day, rejecting the Trump administration’s challenge to invalidate a state law.
The 5-4 decision upholds a Mississippi law that had permitted the counting of mail-in ballots that were postmarked before election day but arrived up to five days afterwards.
The outcome could have affected voting deadlines in more than a dozen states that will be pivotal in deciding which party controls Congress after this November’s midterm elections.
The states that allow late-arriving postal ballots are mostly Democratic-leaning, although a few Republican-led jurisdictions also allow a grace period.
The court’s majority opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices.
In the opinion, Justice Barrett wrote that the ruling does not conflict with existing federal law, which stipulates that the “Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November” is the “day for the election”.
“The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,” she wrote.
The ruling marks a significant political defeat for President Trump, who has repeatedly stated that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to fraud and said – with no evidence – that the practice prevented him from winning the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
In March, Trump’s lawyer argued before the Supreme Court in support of the Republican National Committee-led lawsuit against Mississippi’s mail ballot deadline.
The challenge focused on an 1845 congressional statute that defines election day as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Republicans argued that the law requires ballots to be not just postmarked but received by that date.
“Election-day receipt promotes election integrity and voter confidence as much today as it did when Congress passed that law,” the Trump administration told the Supreme Court in a legal brief.
