Supreme Court Ruling Allows California to Continue Accepting Ballots After Election Day

“The Supreme Court’s ruling today was a win for voting rights,” Sen. Alex Padilla said at a news conference on Monday morning in San Francisco. “And I think a clear message is that Donald Trump does not control elections. It’s the people who drive our democracy, not this president who has a tendency to overreach.”

In the court’s 5-4 decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote that the Election Day laws written by Congress only established a uniform day of voting.

“The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,” Barrett wrote.

Barrett’s opinion was joined by justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented.

“Allowing absentee ballots to pour in over the days and weeks after election day, by which point preliminary election returns are being publicly reported, creates greater opportunity for fraud and risks further undermining the public’s confidence in election integrity,” Alito wrote.

President Donald Trump called the ruling “a tremendous loss” in a social media post, and he urged Congress to pass legislation that would require voter identification and limit mail-in voting. The Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief in the Watson case, supporting the RNC.

During oral arguments in March, Alito pointed to arguments that late-arriving ballots can also erode public confidence by slowing down the counting of votes.

In reality, the prolonged vote count in California is the result of the large numbers of vote-by-mail ballots received before the end of Election Day.

Three days after the June 2 primary, California election officials reported 2.5 million uncounted ballots received through Election Day, compared to under 400,000 uncounted ballots received in the days after.

Election officials have spent years urging voters to return their ballots early — or to a ballot dropbox — to avoid missing the postmark deadline.

Still, in the 2024 general election, 406,132 ballots were received after Election Day in California, accounting for 2.5% of the overall turnout.

“That’s still a lot of ballots and a lot of voters, and so we’re really relieved to know that our grace period is protected,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.

The state budget agreement announced by Newsom and legislative leaders on Friday sets aside $29 million to help counties hire staff and purchase equipment to help speed up the counting of ballots, as well as $10 million for the secretary of state and counties to encourage voters to return their ballots early.

Alexander said challenges to California’s vote-by-mail system will continue beyond the Watson case — including the Trump administration’s effort to have the U.S. Postal Service check vote-by-mail ballots against a list of eligible voters.

The order, which is currently being challenged in court by California, was blasted by Democratic senators in a letter last week as an effort to “allow USPS to adjudicate who can and cannot vote by mail.”

“The reality is that while this [Watson] decision is great news for California voters and California elections, we aren’t out of the woods yet with regards to the U.S. Postal Service,” Alexander said.