Some States Already Preparing for Potential Supreme Court Ban on Late Ballots [View all]

Francisco Aguilar, the secretary of state in Nevada, stepped out of the Supreme Court in Washington on Monday, where justices had just heard arguments about the legality of counting mail votes that arrive after Election Day. He immediately called his top deputy.

The court’s conservative majority had appeared deeply skeptical of the arguments for continuing the practice. So Mr. Aguilar’s message was urgent, he later said in an interview. He began listing things “we need to start working on and answering.” And in the middle of the midterm election season, they couldn’t wait for a decision to land — perhaps as late as June. “We have to provide a road map for the county clerks,” he said into the phone.

Mr. Aguilar, a Democrat, is one of 18 top election officials in states and territories across the country bracing for the possibility that the Supreme Court will require major changes to election law just months before the midterm election in November. Part of the urgency: getting the message out to voters that late-arriving ballots may no longer be counted. Such a decision could affect hundreds of thousands of voters.

The case centers on a Mississippi law that allows the state to accept ballots mailed and postmarked by Election Day that arrive up to five days later. Similar laws are on the books in 17 other states and territories, though the length of the grace period varies. In the 2024 election, at least 725,000 ballots arrived in the legally permitted post-Election Day time period across 14 states that provided data to The New York Times.



https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/25/us/politics/supreme-court-mail-ballots-states.html