The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, preserving election rules in nearly 30 states and rejecting a Republican-led challenge that would have forced a major change in how ballots are handled.
The 5-4 decision came in a Mississippi case and left in place a law that allowed ballots to be counted if they arrived within five business days of the election and were postmarked by Election Day. Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices.
The ruling matters now because it settles the rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections, when states would otherwise have had to rewrite ballot-counting procedures. In the states covered by the ruling, mailed ballots can still be accepted after Election Day so long as they meet the deadline set by state law and were mailed on time.
The case turned on a narrow but consequential question: whether federal law establishes a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast and received by that date. Mississippi argued no, and the court agreed. A federal appeals court in New Orleans had earlier struck down the state law, creating the kind of uncertainty election officials typically try to avoid this close to a national vote.
The decision also runs against a political fight Donald Trump has kept alive for years. Mail voting has been one of his most frequent targets, and he has repeatedly tied it to fraud claims after his loss to Joe Biden. More than 60 court decisions, along with his own attorney general, found no merit in that argument, but the Supreme Court chose to keep the existing ballot-counting rules in place anyway.
What remains unresolved is not the law itself but how far the ruling reaches inside the states that rely on later-arriving ballots. In just over half of them, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to military and overseas voters, leaving the rest of the nearly 30 states with a patchwork that will continue to vary from one election system to another.
