WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that states can count ballots that arrive after Election Day, a practice President Donald Trump has persistently targeted.
The decision rejected a Republican-led attack on laws in more than half the states, including Maryland, 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 of those states, the more forgiving deadlines apply only to ballots cast by military and overseas voters.
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 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 that allowed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrived within five business days of the election.
Monday’s ruling does not change the counting of mail ballots in Maryland’s primary or general elections.
Maryland lawmakers passed a law this year in anticipation of a different Supreme Court ruling. The state law would have allowed election officials to count valid but late-arriving mail ballots in state and local races but not in federal contests.
State Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Montgomery County Democrat who sponsored the law, called it a “bill that I hope we don’t need” when she pitched it to fellow lawmakers in February.
Maryland is among more than a dozen states that count votes from most ballots that are sent in the mail by Election Day but arrive later.
In Maryland, a ballot must be postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted. (Several additional states allow counting of late-arriving ballots only from military and overseas voters.)
Under Maryland law, election officials conduct two rounds of post-Election Day canvassing of mail ballots: the first on the Thursday after the election and the second on the following week’s Friday. That allows time for properly postmarked ballots to arrive from far-flung locales.
It’s not clear, however, just how many ballots the state typically receives after Election Day. Election officials previously did not need to distinguish when a ballot arrived; rather, they focused on when a ballot was postmarked, Maryland Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis said.
Most properly postmarked but late-arriving ballots tend to land at election offices in the first couple of days after Election Day, DeMarinis said.
Mail voting has become increasingly popular in Maryland and around the nation since the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, when election officials urged people to vote by mail as a public health measure.
For this month’s primary election, officials sent 536,181 mail ballots to Maryland voters, and 160,521 were accepted through Sunday evening.
Banner reporter Brenda Wintrode contributed to this story.
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