{"id":308,"date":"2026-06-29T23:36:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T23:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=308"},"modified":"2026-06-29T23:36:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T23:36:42","slug":"the-mail-ballot-case-squeaked-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"The Mail-Ballot Case Squeaked By"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Supreme Court shot down a fringe attack on American elections Monday, rejecting an effort to nullify mail ballots that are cast by Election Day but arrive shortly thereafter. About 30 states currently count these ballots, and by a 5\u20134 vote, the justices let them continue to do so. Justice Amy Coney Barrett\u2019s majority opinion in was straightforward: Congress has never passed a law prohibiting this practice, and until it does, states have constitutional authority to allow it.<\/p>\n

Read more Elena Kagan Just Bolstered the Fourth Amendment in a Badly Needed Way<\/a><\/p>\n

Remarkably, four justices\u2014Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh\u2014dissented from that holding. Alito\u2019s opinion for this far-right bloc insisted that Congress covertly outlawed late-arriving ballots when it enshrined the date of federal elections into law. (It did no such thing.) He further fanned the flames of Donald Trump\u2019s fever-dream conspiracy theories, writing that the majority\u2019s decision \u201ccreates greater opportunity for fraud and risks further undermining the public\u2019s confidence in election integrity.\u201d Instances of \u201cvoter fraud,\u201d he insisted, \u201care not hard to come by,\u201d and Monday\u2019s decision will allow for \u201cvoter manipulation.\u201d The ruling \u201cwill only exacerbate voters\u2019 distrust\u201d by removing a \u201churdle for bad actors seeking to stuff ballot boxes when early election results suggest a tight race.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Slate Video Content<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

On a pop-up bonus episode of Amicus for Slate Plus members, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed Alito\u2019s paranoid dissent and its dire implications for the Supreme Court\u2019s future election cases. Part of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n

Dahlia Lithwick: This is objectively good news in one sense, but also a chillingly close split in a case that should not be hard. But the court got to the right place, and that\u2019s what smells like winning these days?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Joseph Stern:<\/strong> It\u2019s terrifying what a squeaker this is. I\u2019m especially disturbed that Kavanaugh dissented and joined the part of Alito\u2019s opinion that rants about \u201cabsentee-ballot fraud.\u201d I had hoped he would find his way toward reason and understand that this was a Hail Mary case from Republicans who just wanted to disenfranchise people. But in the end, he sided with Alito. It\u2019s a very ominous sign that his brain has been pickled by Fox News and he has cast his lot with the bad guys. I\u2019m happy these state laws were upheld, but this should have been 9\u20130, with a one-page decision saying that there is simply no federal law that governs late-arriving ballots.<\/p>\n

In recent presidential elections, the court acquitted itself pretty well. There were a lot of ridiculous lawsuits that challenged a lot of ballots, and yet, with a handful of exceptions, we didn\u2019t get weird Donald Trump craziness at SCOTUS. Yet here\u2019s Alito, bringing his own crazy to the table, suggesting that any ballot that\u2019s counted after Election Day is a lie. That\u2019s chilling.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Just Handed Trump the Keys to the Entire Kingdom<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that there are four justices who accept at least some of Trump\u2019s big lie about how the 2020 election was stolen through mail ballots. You can\u2019t come away from Alito\u2019s opinion without concluding that these guys believe that all late-arriving ballots are fraudulent, and that the act of counting them somehow taints the result of the election. There\u2019s all kinds of language in Alito\u2019s opinion about how these ballots are especially susceptible to fraud and are potentially going to \u201cflip\u201d the \u201coutcome\u201d of elections. Of course, they don\u2019t \u201cflip\u201d the outcome; they just decide it, because the outcome is when every valid vote is counted, and these are valid votes! He spins all these ridiculous hypotheticals about how people could \u201crecall\u201d their ballots, which is not something that anybody actually does. He basically claims that this decision will facilitate voter fraud when that is just not in evidence.<\/p>\n

I really worry about the Fox News brain on display here. I worry that these four justices are so closed off from reality and the outside world. It seems as if they are not reading real news or talking to normal people; they are absolutely on a Fox News IV drip. They are mainlining Trump\u2019s Truth Social account, right? They really do believe that blue states are rigging federal elections and that it\u2019s their job to stop it. And even though Congress has not enacted the law that they want to see, they\u2019re just going to write it into the statute themselves. When the 5th<\/sup> Circuit does that, as it did here, we\u2019re used to it. But these are Supreme Court justices. And I am gravely concerned about what happens if they can just get John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett on their team in one of these cases, as they may next term. It would be absolutely catastrophic. This<\/em> could have been catastrophic! It was one vote away from being one of the biggest disasters of the term.<\/p>\n

Alito\u2019s purported concern here is people\u2019s \u201cconfidence in our elections\u201d\u2014like, if we could just constrict voting rights, people would believe in voting again, or we just need to convince everyone that what the Framers really wanted was for Election Day to be the day when votes are counted. And there is so much cynicism in that play. Give them a urine test, because that is cynicism on steroids. And it is very, very hard to hear from somebody who\u00a0knows better at every level.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

He has laid out something that Republicans can now cite every time they claim that voter fraud exists. They can\u2019t cite the facts or reality, but they can point to an opinion by a Supreme Court justice, joined by three others, that says that this is a real problem and the majority wouldn\u2019t let them fix it. It\u2019s not going to be pretty to see how that plays out in 2026 if there is a contested election and a close vote and one state comes down to a small tally of late-arriving ballots. These guys are going to go HAM.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more The Supreme Court Takes One More Big Step Toward Autocracy<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt seems like they are not reading real news or talking to normal people; they are absolutely on a Fox News IV drip.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[88,29,15,16],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-amy-coney-barrett","tag-samuel-alito","tag-supreme-court","tag-voting"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Mail-Ballot Case Squeaked By - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=308\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Mail-Ballot Case Squeaked By - 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