One of the suppurating sores that still bedevil our body politic in the aftermath of COVID-19 is the ongoing abuse of mail-in voting. Absentee ballots have long been available to a small number of voters, of course. But, during the pandemic, many states used public safety as a pretext to dramatically expand eligibility for mail-in voting and to extend the deadlines for receiving these ballots. Now, at least 30 states continue to count such votes long after Election Day has come and gone. This inevitably creates concerns about election integrity. Consequently, it was only a matter of time before the U.S. Supreme Court would be required to decide if post-election vote counting violates federal law.

This practice clearly violates the will of Congress as expressed 150 years ago and federal statutes certainly preempt state law.

This is why the Court quietly added Watson v. Republican National Committee to its docket last week. In 2020, Mississippi passed “emergency” legislation requiring election officials to accept absentee ballots “postmarked on or before the date of the election and received by the registrar no more than five (5) business days after the election.” Long after the pandemic had ended, Mississippi inexplicably made that post-election deadline permanent. Thus, in 2024, the RNC and the Mississippi Republican Party went to federal court to challenge the statute. The U.S. district court judge ruled against them.

The RNC subsequently won, however, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Mississippi appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to take up the case. It goes without saying that the Democrats and their mouthpieces in the corporate media are weaving elaborate conspiracy theories involving this case. They insist that Watson v. Republican National Committee is part of a deeply sinister plot cooked up by President Trump, the Department of Justice, and the Supreme Court to disfranchise millions of Americans.  DNC Chair Ken Martin would have us believe that the case is nothing less than a Trojan horse full of rightwing shock troops whose primary target is voting rights in general. Here is the ridiculous statement Martin released:

Republicans don’t want to see Americans exercising their sacred right to vote. They want to restrict, limit, and infringe on the rights of voters because they know that when more eligible citizens vote, Republicans lose. For years, the RNC has set its sights on disenfranchising voters who exercise their right to vote by mail. Voting by mail and voting early are safe, secure, and empower eligible voters to participate in our elections … The DNC will fight like hell in this case for the rights of Mississippians and every other citizen to make sure their voices are heard and their votes are counted.

This is all nonsense, of course. Watson v. Republican National Committee turns on a single issue: Whether the federal election-day statutes preempt state laws that accept ballots received by election officials after “the day for the election.” That day was unambiguously established by Congress in March of 1875 as follows: “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election.” For most of the subsequent 150 years, states complied with this congressional mandate by ensuring that election officials stopped accepting ballots after  … well … Election Day. In recent years, however, states have increasingly deviated from that practice in order to process mail-in votes.

The RNC points out in its Supreme Court brief that states in which election officials accept post-election ballots risk “the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.” California’s notoriously protracted vote counting process is a perfect case in point. In 2024, several Golden State congressional districts counted mail-in ballots for weeks before announcing a winner. In CA-45, for example, Republican incumbent Michelle Steel led Democrat challenger Derek Tran by about 11,000 votes on Election Day. The vote counting continued, however, for 22 more days, and the Democrat miraculously won with a 653-vote margin.

Nor did the skulduggery end there. In CA-13, Republican incumbent John Duarte was about 3,100 votes ahead of Democrat challenger Adam Gray on Nov. 6. The total number of votes cast in this district was fewer than 211,000 and, after more than three weeks of ballot counting, the Democrat somehow emerged victorious with a whopping 187-vote margin. Likewise, in CA-27, Republican incumbent Mike Garcia led Democrat challenger George Whitesides by about 4,800 votes on Election Day. But the vote counters soldiered on until they found enough post-election ballots to declare Whitesides the winner. It is no coincidence that California is one of six states recently sued by the Justice Department for refusing to allow their voter rolls to be audited:

Today the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced the filing of federal lawsuits against six states, California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, for failure to produce their statewide voter registration lists upon request. According to the lawsuits, the Attorney General is uniquely charged by Congress with the enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which were designed by Congress to ensure that states have proper and effective voter registration and voter list maintenance programs.

The obvious reason these states refuse to produce their voter rolls for inspection is that they contain the names of deceased individuals and many who have simply relocated to other states. Moreover, it is all but certain that they list illegal aliens. Like all the states that continue counting after Election Day, their voter rolls are in effect caches of surplus ballots from which unethical election officials can draw if they need a few hundred votes to get some candidate over the top. This is precisely why the Supreme Court must use Watson v. Republican National Committee to put a stop to post-election vote counting. This practice clearly violates the will of Congress as expressed 150 years ago and federal statutes certainly preempt state law.

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