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Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:
The U.S. Supreme Court blessed grace periods for ballots mailed by Election Day Monday, rejecting a GOP bid to restrict mail voting and preserving pro-voter laws in 14 states. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a 2020 Mississippi law that let mail ballots postmarked by Election Day still count if they arrived within five days later. Writing for the majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC), Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected the GOP’s argument that federal laws setting a date for elections preempted states from accepting ballots after that day.* “[E]lection-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked after election day yet received afterward,” Barrett wrote.
“The Framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election laws ‘applicable to every probable change in the situation of the country.’ So instead of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that ‘a discretionary power over elections’ needed to be lodged ‘somewhere,’” Barrett wrote. “Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged in this Court. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”
Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In addition to protecting similar laws in 13 other states and Washington D.C., the ruling will make it harder for the GOP to mount a legal assault on early voting, which legal experts said would be likely if the court ruled for the RNC. It also spares laws in 17 states that specifically provide ballot receipt grace periods for military and overseas voters.
Good news for fair elections and accurate vote counting: SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in Watson v. RNC that ballots postmarked before election day but arriving after election day are allowed to be counted. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion in Watson, and joining her were the 3 Liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson) + Chief Justice John Roberts.
See Also:
HuffPost: In Watson, Supreme Court Slaps Down Republicans’ Attempt At Dismissing Late Mail-In Ballots
