Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito authored the dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision on mail-in ballot deadlines on Monday, blasting the majority’s disregard for federal law.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, the US Supreme Court on Monday ruled 5-4 that federal law does not require mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day.
The lawsuit challenging the mail-ballots was filed by the Republican National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi.
Fake conservative Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, arguing that the Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots to be received five days after election day complies with the federal election day statute. Chief Justice Roberts sided with Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.
Justice Alito writes in the dissenting opinion, “Federal law designates ‘the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November’ as ‘election day,’ 3 U. S. C. §21, and provides that elections for federal office must be held on that date,” noting that the electorate must, in accordance with federal election-day statutes, make its choice on election day.
“If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated,” he continues. “The acceptance of these late-arriving ballots effectively postpones the date on which the electorate’s choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement.”
He further argues that the definition of “election” in “election day” is the “expression of the electorate’s choice,” making it necessary that the final submission and collection of ballots must occur on one election day, not five days after, as permitted by Mississippi law.
“Back when all voting occurred in person, the voters went to the polls on election day. They then completed ballots and turned them over to election officials. When the polls closed, those officials had in their possession a fixed collection of ballots, and taken together, those ballots embodied the electorate’s collective choice,” he writes.
Today, the use of mail-in voting, he writes, “cannot change the fact that under federal law, the electorate’s collective choice must still be authoritatively expressed on election day.”
“The Court disagrees and concludes that the election-day statutes merely require that each individual cast a vote on or before election day. See ante, at 9. But if that is all that the election-day statutes require, there is no sense in which the electorate as a whole can be seen as making its choice on election day. Rather, the electorate’s choice would be made piecemeal over an extended period prior to election day, and that prospect is blatantly contrary to what the election-day statutes demand,” he writes. “Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days. The election-day statutes require that federal elections occur on that date.” Alito further notes that under Mississippi’s law, allowing ballot collection to continue for five days after election day, “the ‘election’ is not held until the end of that period” in violation of federal law.
Coney Barrett, however, wrote in the majority opinion, “The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”
“Due dates for absentee ballots have shifted over time. During the Civil War, States that allowed absentee voting imposed an election-day deadline for ballot receipt,” Coney Barrett further argued. “But during World War I, States began counting absentee ballots received after election day.”
But Alito debunks Coney Barrett’s claim, writing, “Even when the Civil War took soldiers hundreds of miles from their usual polling places, election day still meant ballot-collection day,” and “regardless of the method a State used, each State continued to mandate that poll workers, whether on the field or ‘back home,’ received soldiers’ ballots by election day.” This includes votes that were mailed, distributed and collected by election commissioners, and polling places that were administered by military officers on the battlefield as ways of ensuring federal law was complied with.
“During the World Wars,” he continues, “Congress and at least nine States allowed absentee ballots to arrive after election day in certain situations,” which Alito describes as “short-lived outlier rules” as only two states allowed ballots to arrive after election day by 1977.
“Although post-election-day deadlines have become more widespread in the last five decades,5 these developments postdate the last election-day statute by over 50 years and the first statute by over a century. These late-intime practices therefore count for little when discerning the timing restrictions that Congress imposed when it enacted those statutes,” he adds, highlighting the legislative intent behind the election day statutes.
Alito further slams the majority opinion, writing. “Not only is today’s decision inconsistent with statutory text, legal context, historical practice, and precedent; it also threatens to produce lamentable consequences. The majority’s holding spawns a slurry of troubling election-law questions and risks further undermining Americans’ confidence in election integrity.”
“Today’s decision is inconsistent with the terms of the election-day statutes, contemporary election-law principles, two centuries of historical practice, and the case law on the question presented. It opens up and fails to resolve a host of questions for state election officials and courts. And it creates a serious risk of further undermining public confidence in our elections and our system of self-government,” he concludes.
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