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Alaska, other states can count ballots that arrive after Election Day, US Supreme Court rules in 5-4 decision
- Mark Sabbatini
- Jun 29
- 3 min read
Trump sought change, claiming it helped cause his 2020 defeat; opponents in Alaska said elimination of 10-day grace period will disenfranchise voters in rural communities
By Mark Sabbatini
Juneau Independent
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that states can count ballots arriving after Election Day, rejecting a change sought by President Donald Trump and maintaining a grace period many Alaskans say is vital given the state’s large number of rural voters.
The decision involved a case in Mississippi filed by Republican officials seeking to nullify a law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received by elections officials up to five business days later. Justices in the majority ruled the U.S. Constitution specifies states set election regulations, rejecting the argument that federal law sets a single Election Day by which all votes must be counted.
More than half of states, plus the District of Columbia, have laws that allow a grace period for ballots postmarked by Election Day, although in many of those states it applies only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters. The grace period in Alaska is 10 days for all ballots mailed within the U.S. and 15 days for ballots mailed from overseas.
Of the 340,981 votes cast in Alaska during the 2024 general election, about 94,000 were counted after Election Day. Most of those were 55,329 absentee and other ballots the state Division of Elections had already received. However, the division also reported the day after the election more than 25,000 blank absentee ballots sent to voters had not yet been returned, but would be counted if received and postmarked by Election Day.
Denise Louisaac, a poll worker in Dillingham, told Anchorage radio station KNBA last April that it took 10 days after Election Day in 2020 for the last batch of early voting ballots to get from Dillingham to Anchorage to her regional election office in Nome.
“If early absentee voting goes until the Monday before Election Day, there is no way possible for the mail to deliver that ballot to Nome in time,” she told the radio station. “It will definitely disenfranchise smaller rural communities.”
The Supreme Court heard the case in March after a federal appeals court struck down the Mississippi law.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — in supporting Mississippi’s law.
“Nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day,” Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.
Also, she noted, "plaintiffs’ policy arguments about election integrity and voter confidence are properly directed to legislatures, not courts…and regardless, plaintiffs’ definition of ‘election’ would do little to address the concerns they identify.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, which Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined, and Brett Kavanaugh joined in part.
"Not only is today's decision inconsistent with statutory text, legal context, historical practice, and precedent; it also threatens to produce lamentable consequences," Alito wrote. "The majority's holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans' confidence in election integrity."
The New York Times on Monday noted Trump "has long criticized voting by mail, falsely claiming that the practice is open to fraud and helped lead to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election." The Associated Press report on Monday’s decision noted "strong evidence to the contrary and years of experience in numerous states" that rebut the fraud claims, and "more than 60 court decisions and his own attorney general said that argument had no merit" regarding the outcome of the 2020 election.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.
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