President Donald Trump has slammed the Supreme Court for handing him a ‘tremendous loss’ after five of the court’s nine justices said federal law did not preempt Mississippi’s law allowing mail-in ballots received after Election Day to count if postmarked before Election Day. Trump lashed out on his social media platform, writing that the high court’s decision was yet another reason for Congress to pass the voting restriction bill he has been obsessing over for months now. He claimed there’s ‘no excuse for a politician, or otherwise’ to oppose the anti-voting bill, stating ‘There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING.’ The 5-4 ruling, authored by Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett, upholds a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted, marking a loss for the Republican party, which brought the case ahead of the November midterms.
Writing for herself, Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three Democratic appointees, Barrett said that Mississippi’s measure does not violate federal statutes that establish Election Day as the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. ‘The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,’ she said. The ruling stemmed from a challenge to a Mississippi law that allowed mail-in ballots to be counted up to five business days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day. Like other states, Mississippi passed the law in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic to give people more time to vote because in-person activities were restricted and mail services were overwhelmed.
But since then, Trump and his iteration of the GOP have turned on the practice because it has permitted Democrats to win close elections by allowing votes cast by Democratic voters to be counted even when Republicans’ in-person votes gave a GOP candidate a lead early in the counting process. Mail-in ballots tend to skew in favor of Democratic candidates because Democrats are more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, according to data collected during the 2024 election. In response to this trend, Trump has repeatedly misrepresented mail-in ballot voting as a method for Democrats to ‘cheat,’ despite there being no evidence of mass voter fraud by mail.
