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The Supreme Court case attempting to sabotage voting by mail, explained

The Republican Party wants the Court to toss out thousands of ballots. Its arguments are laughably weak.

The premise of the Republican Party’s arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee is that, nearly 200 years ago, Congress banned the states from counting thousands of the ballots that are cast every year in modern-day elections — and somehow no one noticed this fact until 2024.

The case turns on three federal laws which set the date when elections for president, the US House and the US Senate must be held. While the three laws are worded differently and were enacted at different times, they all do basically the same thing. The statute governing House elections, for example, provides that “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election.”

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

The first version of these laws was enacted in 1845, when Congress set the date for presidential elections.

When this 1845 law was passed, US elections looked very different from how they do today. Nearly all voters cast their ballots in person, and they did so in their home communities. Most of the United States didn’t allow voters to cast a ballot away from home until the Civil War, when Union soldiers were allowed to vote from the field. Modern-day absentee voting, where voters who are absent from their district may cast a ballot by mail, largely did not exist until the early 20th century.

And yet, in Watson, the plaintiffs — the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party of Mississippi — claim that when Congress set the date for federal elections many decades ago, it effectively required states to toss out thousands of mailed ballots more than a century later. Many states including Mississippi, whose law is at issue in Watson, permit ballots that are mailed prior to Election Day, but that arrive after that date has passed, to be counted just like any other ballot. The GOP argues that these ballots must be tossed out instead.

If the Watson plaintiffs prevail, the very likely effect would be to skew elections in the Republican Party’s favor by canceling votes cast by Democrats. In recent elections, Democrats have been more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, and Republican President Donald Trump has even campaigned against laws broadly authorizing voting by mail. So, if Republicans convince the Supreme Court to toss out some of the ballots cast by mail, the trashed ballots will be disproportionately Democratic.

The idea that Congress intended to regulate absentee voting by mail, a practice that barely existed until the 20th century, when it set the date for........

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