The Supreme Court issued a crushing blow to election integrity efforts, ruling 5-4 that a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots received after Election Day for federal elections may be counted.
“As we have said before, the federal election-day statutes ‘simply regulate the time of the election,’” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority opinion. “By setting the day for the ‘election,’ these statutes set the day when the electorate must make its choice. It is a ‘fundamental canon of statutory construction that words generally should be interpreted as taking their ordinary meaning at the time Congress enacted the statute.’”
“The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,” she concluded.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing a dissenting opinion, argued that the Court’s decision “is inconsistent with the terms of the election-day statutes, contemporary election-law principles, two centuries of historical practice, and the case law on the question presented.”
“It opens up and fails to resolve a host of questions for state election officials and courts,” he added. “And it creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government.”
President Trump weighed in on the ruling, declaring the decision to be a “tremendous loss.” He then called for lawmakers to pass the Save America Act. “The United States Senate seems unable to do so. In a time when there is a powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country, one more dangerous than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th, all Dumocrats, and our five Republican Senate Hold Outs, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell must vote to SAVE OUR COUNTRY,” he added. “There can be no more excuses!”
Conservative legal groups filed amicus briefs in support of the case. Lawyers for Citizens United argued the longer a ballot-collection window remains open, the more vulnerable it is to manipulation.
“The longer the period over which the election is conducted, the greater the opportunity for and risk of fraud,” they wrote in a February brief. “Some states are determined to extend election day, both before and after, transforming a day into an election season, providing numerous opportunities for all manner of election manipulation.”
