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The Supreme Court seems alarmingly willing to trash thousands of ballots

At least four justices appear to be on board with a frivolous lawsuit attacking voting by mail.

If the United States had a nonpartisan judiciary, Watson v. Republican National Committee would have been laughed out of court months ago. The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit in Watson is that, beginning in 1845, Congress banned states from counting many absentee ballots — and somehow no one noticed this for the better part of two centuries.

To understand Watson, it’s important to understand how President Donald Trump has transformed previously technocratic questions about election administration into a partisan battlefield. Until Trump’s rise, neither party really contested that states may accept absentee ballots or other ballots cast by mail, and even many red states were allowing more and more voters to cast their ballot by mail. Indeed, it’s notable that, in Watson, the GOP challenges a voting law in the blood-red state of Mississippi.

Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, however, Trump started attacking voting by mail. As a result, Democrats are now much more likely to mail their ballots than Republicans, so any new policy that invalidates mailed ballots is likely to skew elections toward Trump’s Republican Party.

Which brings us to the specific legal theory in Watson. The GOP (along with the Libertarian Party of Mississippi) claim that three federal laws which set the date for federal elections (one governing presidential elections, one governing House elections, and one governing Senate elections) preclude any state from counting a ballot that arrives after Election Day, even if it was mailed prior to that date.

Mississippi is one of many states that counts some ballots that arrive after the congressionally determined Election Day. Under Mississippi law, ballots that are mailed by Election Day, but that arrive up to five business days after the election, will still be counted. The Republican Party claims this practice........

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