Watson v. Republican National Committee: SCOTUS Set to Rule on Mail-In Ballot Access in 2026

I. Introduction

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he intended to “lead a movement” against mail-in voting, a system which comprised over 30% of ballots cast in the 2024 Presidential Election. In anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections, which in and of themselves serve as the first national referendum on the direction and durability of Trump’s second-term agenda, the sitting President vowed to launch his anti-mail campaign by banning the electoral practice in an executive order. With Congress being granted constitutional domain over the “times, places and manner” of holding elections, this plan to “do everything possible [to] get rid of mail-in ballots” has proved more difficult than the White House perhaps originally expected.

It is against this backdrop that the Supreme Court agreed to hear Watson v. Republican National Committee on November 10, 2025, a direct Republican challenge to a Mississippi law permitting poll workers to count absentee ballots postmarked for Election Day but received up to five days afterwards. In a Supreme Court term already marked by its anticipatory focus on voting rights ahead of the upcoming election season, how the Court ultimately responds to this challenge will determine not only the fate of sixteen states’ mail-in ballot laws, but also the extent to which federal courts are willing to engage with growing partisan distrust of election administration systems.

II. Case Background

Under Mississippi Code § 23-15-637, mail-in ballots are processed so long as they are “postmarked on or before Election Day” and “received on or within five (5) business days of the election.” At issue in Watson is whether this receipt window violates federal statutes that designate a single, uniform “Election Day” for federal offices. While Congress has long specified in 2 U.S.C. §§ 1 and 7 that elections for federal office must occur on “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November,” federal law has never explicitly required that every ballot cast by that day also be in the physical possession of election officials when the polls close. Nor has Election Day historically been the only day in which the aforementioned statues allow voters to cast ballots, as bolstered by Voting Integrity Project, Inc. v. Bomer (5th Cir. 2000)—in fact, in recent election cycles, the overwhelming majority of ballots were cast during the early voting window, either in-person or by mail. Watson thus turns on whether Congress’s designation of Election Day fixes the deadline for voters to cast ballots or the point by which election officials must receive them.

Judge Louis Guirola of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi upheld the Mississippi statute, rejecting the plaintiffs’ reliance on Foster v. Love (1997), where the Supreme Court held that Louisiana’s “open primary” system violated federal election statutes by allowing voting for certain federal offices to “consummate” prior to Election Day, on the ground that Mississippi’s law does not permit voting to conclude prior to the federally prescribed date. Foster famously declined “paring the term ‘election’ in [2 U.S.C.] § 7 down to the definitional bone,” creating a national precedent for interpreting election administration cases under an extremely wide scope. Guirola then flagged a threshold dispute over the proper preemption standard, noting that defendants invoked the aforementioned Bomer’s requirement of a “direct conflict” with federal law in order for federal law to preempt state law, while plaintiffs urged the broader Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council (2013) standard, under which state election laws must yield to congressional standards whenever they are in any way “inconsistent” with federal statutes, regardless of “direct conflict.”

The Fifth Circuit reversed the district court in a three-judge panel decision. The panel held that Mississippi’s post-Election-Day receipt window is preempted by federal law because the Election Day statutes “require all ballots to be both ‘cast by voters and received by state officials’ by the end of Election Day.” Judge James Graves dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc on behalf of five judges, issuing a pointed rebuke of the panel’s effort to extrapolate a complete definition of an ‘election’ from Foster, a case that expressly stopped short of doing so. On the issue of “consummation,” Graves criticized the panel’s reliance on Bomer, noting that these cases specifically dealt with elections that concluded prematurely, whereas Mississippi’s law permits ballots to be counted even if they are received after Election Day, provided they are timely cast. He further recast the dispute as one with concrete consequences for service members, warning that the panel’s reading would upend longstanding absentee-voting practices with “roots dating back to colonial America,” where soldiers’ ballots were routinely cast on Election Day but counted only after their return.

Indeed, Graves’s focus on military absentee voting surfaces a line of consequence that would complicate any ruling for the RNC. A total of twenty-nine states, plus the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico, accept absentee ballots from military personnel stationed either overseas or far away from their voting jurisdiction postmarked on or before Election Day. As mentioned in an amicus brief signed by a group of nineteen states and Washington, D.C., collapsing Election Day into a rigid receipt deadline would functionally disenfranchise deployed service members whose ballots cannot reliably arrive on that timetable, a possibility which President Trump appears none too pleased about. Watson has already drawn ample concern from veterans’ and military-family organizations, including another amicus brief signed by the Vet Voice Foundation and the Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans.

Congressional legislation geared towards military voters historically allows for receipt delays such as the one at issue in Watson, continuing to complicate the RNC’s claim. Notably, when Congress enacted the 1986 Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), it required states to make absentee ballots available to military and overseas voters with the express understanding that those ballots would be returned and counted according to all state-defined deadlines without imposing a federal receipt cutoff. That understanding was reaffirmed two decades later in the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, which expanded UOCAVA’s protections and again keyed ballot validity to state-defined receipt deadlines rather than to Election Day itself. Most tellingly, when Congress revisited the meaning of “Election Day” in the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, it chose to regulate only the narrow circumstances under which voting itself could extend past Election Day while leaving untouched the well-known practice of counting ballots cast by that day but received later. Taken together, these enactments make it increasingly difficult to read the federal Election Day statutes as silently forbidding a system of absentee voting which Congress has repeatedly accommodated, and, in some contexts, affirmatively relied upon.

III. Conclusion

Together with Louisiana v. Callais, a case addressing the future of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the scope of federal protection against vote dilution, Watson v. Republican National Committee reflects a term in which the Court is being asked to define not only who may vote, but also how the larger electoral process ought to be administered. At a time of intense polarization and repeated challenges to electoral legitimacy, the Court’s answer to this challenge will materially affect whether democratic elections remain capable of producing outcomes that are treated as binding.

A ruling for the RNC would require the Court to travel unusually far from its anti-interventionist predisposition, placing the Court in direct tension with its own, broadly-shared skepticism of judicial overreach. The current bench, particularly Chief Justice Roberts, does not seem poised to make such an interpretive concession. At the very least, this grant of certiorari signals that the Roberts Court is prepared, at last, to bring doctrinal clarity to an area of election administration it has so long left deliberately unresolved—and its timing on the matter could not be more perfect.

Cover image by Tiffany Tertipes licensed under the Unsplash License.