A fringe attack on voting rights just got four votes on the Supreme Court

Watson v. RNC is the easiest election law case to reach the justices in years. It should not have been 5-4.

The premise of the Republican Party’s lawsuit in Watson v. Republican National Committee is that three 19th-century federal laws require thousands of lawfully cast ballots to be tossed in the trash — and somehow no one noticed this fact for the better part of two centuries.

In a nonpartisan judiciary, the case would have never reached the Supreme Court. It would have been unanimously rejected by lower courts and ignored by the justices. But, in the highly partisan judiciary that governs Donald Trump’s America, the Republican Party convinced four justices to sign onto their attempt to trash numerous ballots.

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

Watson, in other words, is less a victory for democracy and the rule of law than it is a warning of what could come if Trump gets to replace even one more member of the Supreme Court. No reasonable judge could agree with Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent, but four of the Court’s nine justices did so, regardless.

The majority opinion in Watson is straightforward and clearly correct

The case involves three federal laws that set the date for presidential, US House, and US Senate elections. While these statutes were enacted at different times and use different wording, they all do more or less the same thing. The statute governing House races, for example, which was enacted in 1845, provides “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election.”

The Republican Party’s argument in Watson (which was also made by the Libertarian Party of Mississippi) is that this law prohibits states from counting absentee ballots that are mailed prior to federally determined Election Day, but that arrive sometime after that date. Mississippi, the defendant in the case, is one of 30 states that allows at least some mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted. In Mississippi, voters enjoy a five-day grace period, so long as the ballot is mailed prior to the deadline.

It should go without saying that, when Congress set the Election Day in 1845, it did not........

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