WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can count ballots that arrive after Election Day, a persistent target of President Donald Trump.
The 5-4 decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states and the District of Columbia that permit mailed ballots to arrive and be counted some number of days after the election, provided they are postmarked by Election Day. The outcome spares officials the headache of changing their ballot rules just a few months before the 2026 midterm congressional elections.
In just over half those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.
Illinois allows ballots to be counted for up to two weeks after Election Day, provided they’re postmarked on Election Day.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the court’s majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices.
“In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day,” Coney Barrett wrote. “That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote — as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”
The legal challenge was part of Trump’s broader attack on most mail balloting, which he has said breeds fraud despite strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states. Trump has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 resulted from fraud even though he has produced no proof and more than 60 court decisions and his own attorney general said that argument had no merit.
The court heard arguments in March in a case from Mississippi pitting the state against Trump’s Republican administration and the Republican and Libertarian parties. At issue was whether federal law sets a single Election Day that requires ballots to be both cast by voters and received by state officials.
The federal appeals court in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law allowing ballots to be counted if they arrive within five business days of the election and are postmarked by Election Day.
U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, R-Illinois, has a similar case in federal court in Illinois. The 7th Circuit Appellate Court had ruled Bost did not have standing to sue the state in the case over its acceptance of late-arriving mail ballots. But he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in January ruled that he does have standing.
While that allowed the case to progress at the lower level, the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling likely sets the precedent for Bost’s appeal.
Weed killer lawsuit
Last week, the Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller in a ruling expected to block thousands of lawsuits alleging it failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.
The case came before the justices after a tidal wave of litigation that included some multibillion-dollar verdicts against Bayer, a German agrochemical manufacturer that acquired Roundup’s original producer, Monsanto, in 2018.
The decision is a victory for President Donald Trump’s administration, which argued in support of Bayer. But it provoked outrage from allies in the “ Make America Healthy Again” movement who want to rein in pesticide use.
Per Investigate Midwest, out of the 500 U.S. counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile (largely concentrated in corn, soybean and fruit-producing states like Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, California and Florida), 60% have cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society suggests the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking.
The high court, in a 7-2 ruling, held that Roundup cannot be sued in state courts for failure to warn because federal regulators have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label. Federal law also bars states from imposing additional or different labeling requirements, the opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh states.
Jerry Nowicki and Investigate Midwest contributed reporting to this story.
