Potential game-changer: SCOTUS to decide whether mail-in ballots must be counted by Election Day
After years of controversy surrounding prolonged vote-counting periods for mail-in ballots, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether these ballots must be received by Election Day
Analysis by Summer Lane | November 10, 2025
In what may be a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide whether federal law can ban mail-in ballots from being counted after Election Day.
In a list of orders released Monday, SCOTUS gave the green light for taking up a case that has been ongoing since 2024, following a challenge from the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Committee against a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day.
“Election Day means Election DAY! Stay tuned!” wrote Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ Harmeet Dhillon, in response to the news.
Dhillon ran for the position of Republican National Committee chair in 2023 but lost the race to Ronna McDaniel. McDaniel, in turn, was replaced by Trump-backed Michael Whatley in 2024 as the chair of the RNC.
Since 2020, mail-in ballots have remained a controversial voting practice. In some states, vote-counting drags on for days or even weeks. For example, according to NPR, California took over a month to deliver a full tally on votes from the 2024 presidential election, thanks to endless caches of mail-in ballots.
In 2020, Pennsylvania failed to make a call on whether Joe Biden had won the presidential election in their state for an additional 87 hours after the polls had closed, with Nevada close behind, per Axios.
Georgia and North Carolina both took days to deliver a final tabulation in the presidential election that year, as well, causing immense frustration for Americans who simply wanted to know who won the election on Election Day.
The rise of mail-in ballots
The mail-in ballot procedure became extremely prevalent in 2020, during the Covid pandemic. However, concerns about chain-of-custody procedures and election security remain at the forefront of many Americans’ minds.
Following the chaotic and endless vote-counting processes of 2020 and again in the 2022 midterm elections, Americans’ overall confidence in election integrity plummeted. According to a poll from AP-NORC in 2023, only 44 percent of the American public believed that the 2024 presidential election results would have an accurate vote count.
Like it or not, the controversies, challenges, and narratives that arose in the wake of 2020 did not inspire Americans to trust the election processes in many states – and who can blame them? While it’s impossible to know which claims about alleged voter fraud are true and which are not, one thing is clear: the modern election system in most states is less than efficient when it comes to counting votes promptly.
A little reform and structure within the process of mail-in ballots certainly couldn’t hurt.
What the Supreme Court will look at
The case that SCOTUS has agreed to take up, Watson v. Republican National Committee, will determine whether mail-in ballots can be counted if they are received after Election Day. According to SCOTUSblog, the law that this suit challenges in Mississippi allows mail-in ballots to be counted in elections if they are received within a five-business-day window after Election Day.
Per the outlet, the law was initially upheld in court, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, upholding the specificity of a federally-appointed Election Day, which requires all ballots to be received at that time.
The state of Mississippi appealed to the Supreme Court earlier this year, asking for a broader deadline for Election Day. The RNC, of course, has asked that the 5th Circuit’s ruling remain in place.
SCOTUS, then, will set the legal precedent on whether federal election ballots can be counted after Election Day.
If the court upholds the 5th Circuit’s ruling on this case, it will end weeks-long discoveries of mail-in ballots in places like California, at least in federal elections. It would force the state to ensure that it reports final vote tallies in a reasonable amount of time, which may help Americans feel more confident in the election process.
If the Supreme Court rules that Election Day is, indeed, a singular and unchanging definition, it would be a step in the right direction for proponents of election security who worry about the broad and seemingly never-ending vote-counting processes in states like California.
Photo: Adobe Stock
