Donald Trump just suffered another major legal setback, and this one could have enormous consequences for the upcoming midterm elections.
In a 5-4 ruling Monday, the Supreme Court rejected an effort backed by Trump and the Republican Party to effectively invalidate thousands of legally cast mail ballots.
The Court ruled that states can continue counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day—as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day, dealing a significant blow to Trump’s years-long campaign against voting by mail.
Ironically, the decisive vote came from one of Trump’s own Supreme Court picks.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three liberal justices to form the majority, rejecting arguments from Republicans that federal law requires every mail ballot to physically arrive by Election Day.
“The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt,” Barrett wrote. “We cannot add to the words Congress chose.”
The case centered on a Mississippi law allowing election officials to count ballots received up to five business days after Election Day, provided they were mailed on time.
Republicans, including the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi GOP, argued that those ballots shouldn’t count.
The Supreme Court disagreed.
The ruling doesn’t require every state to count late-arriving ballots. Instead, it confirms that states are free to adopt those policies without violating federal law.
It’s a significant defeat for Trump, who has spent years portraying mail voting as inherently suspicious despite the absence of evidence showing widespread fraud.
Since losing the 2020 election, Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail ballots are a vehicle for Democrats to “cheat,” a narrative election officials, judges, and numerous investigations have repeatedly failed to substantiate.
The president didn’t take the decision quietly.
Within hours, Trump jumped onto Truth Social to complain about what he called a “tremendous loss” and renewed his demand that Congress pass the SAVE America Act.
That legislation would impose sweeping new federal voting requirements, including mandatory proof of citizenship, stricter voter ID rules, and new restrictions on mail voting.
The Supreme Court’s ruling is likely to complicate that effort by reaffirming that states retain broad authority to administer their own elections.
The ruling doesn’t just apply to Mississippi.
More than a dozen states—including California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Alaska, Texas, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia—already allow certain mail ballots to be counted after Election Day if they’re postmarked on time.
Monday’s decision helps preserve those systems heading into November’s midterm elections.
Voting rights organizations celebrated the ruling as a victory for voters rather than politicians.
“A ballot mailed on time is a vote cast on time,” said the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, arguing that eligible voters shouldn’t lose their voice because of postal delays beyond their control.
The decision marks yet another courtroom setback for Trump’s effort to reshape the nation’s election system through executive action and litigation.
