Blue Brief 2025-2026

and up to 21 days in the state of Washington . There is a growing trend in Republican-leaning states to shorten the time limit for receipt after election day or to require ballots to arrive by election day itself, and in Democratic-leaning states to lengthen the time limit for receiving mail-in ballots after election day. The Trump Administration had urged the Court — to no avail — to strike down the Mississippi practice. The four dissenting justices in Watson agreed with the majority that the case was about interpreting various federal election laws, but pointed out that these laws, several of them enacted in the nineteenth century to allay concerns about election fraud, were adopted at a time when voting was almost always in person at the polls, and it was taken for granted that ballots would be received when they went into the ballot boxes on election day. Do federal election laws impose any ballot receipt deadline at all, the dissenting justices asked? Could states eliminate ballot-receipt deadlines entirely? Instead of requiring mail-in ballots to be submitted through the U.S. Postal Service or a common carrier like FedEx or UPS, as Mississippi does, could a state allow voters to hand their ballots to private intermediaries — a family member, an Uber driver, or a “ballot harvester” affiliated with a political party or interest group, for delivery to the state election authorities? “For state legislatures trying to understand what the [federal] election statutes allow, the majority’s decision opens Pandora’s box,” the dissenting opinion reasoned . The possibility of fraud, or at least the appearance of it, was a prime concern for the dissenting justices: “[T]oday’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may

further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.” Mail-in ballots have been widely recognized by both major political parties to increase the potential for fraud. It is harder for election officials to verify the identity of a person voting by mail. There is a more vulnerable chain of ballot custody. Perhaps above all, mail-in ballots received after election day arrive after the initial results of the election have been announced, alerting perpetrators of possible fraud as to how many ballots might be needed to “flip” a close election. The Watson dissent cited numerous examples of vote fraud using absentee or mail in ballots in recent decades, including elections that were subsequently voided or annulled by state election authorities, state courts, or federal courts after proof of absentee-ballot fraud.

[T]he Court’s 5-to-4 interpretation of existing federal election law is that Congress has not laid down an election-day deadline for mail-in ballots.

The majority did not disagree about the danger of election fraud, or even about the particular susceptibility of late-arriving mail-in ballots to fraud or to reasonable suspicions of it: “Plaintiffs also stress that Mississippi’s law may

UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO SCHOOL OF LAW | Faculty Review of 2025-2026 U.S. Supreme Court Term | Page 33