Elections by ballot, whether by secret ballot, as in the US, or by candidate-coded ballots, often by color, as early on in the US and in sham-election nations, are a two step process: voters mark their ballots, indicating the candidates for whom they’re voting, and they then cast their ballots—put them into a ballot receptacle at a polling station approved by each State’s elections process agency—to be collected and counted.
Mail-in ballots complicate voting, and their arrival after Election Day while still being considered legitimately cast unnecessarily threaten our elections’ integrity. The question of whether mass-mailed late ballots should be counted has arrived on the Supreme Court docket.
Election Day is a nationally statutory date—a single day. Ballots arriving after that day are not cast on Election Day because they’ve not arrived to be cast. It’s bad enough that too many precincts on up to States, whether by dishonesty or incompetence, don’t (not can’t) finish counting the ballots cast by the end of the day, without allowing those not yet cast by Election Day to be counted.
Mississippi law says absentee ballots that are postmarked on time are valid even if officials don’t receive them from the mailman until a week later. Other states have similar rules. The question for the Justices: does accepting tardy mail votes violate the federal law that sets a uniform Election Day?
Mississippi’s argument:
Mississippi suggests that once the US Postal Service takes custody of any outstanding ballots, then the election’s winner is already determined, however long it takes the mail to arrive and the result to become clear. “An election occurs when the voters have cast their ballots,” the state says. “The voters have then chosen and their choice is conclusive: the election is over. An election thus does not depend on when ballots are received.”
That’s the fallacy of the State’s argument. The USPS has never taken custody of a voter’s ballot; it only accepts custody. The responsibility to actually cast that ballot remains the voter’s, and his ballot is not cast until it makes it into the ballot box. His election, therefore, has not occurred until after Election Day if the USPS fails its custody acceptance by delivering the ballot after Election Day has ended and the polls have closed.
It seems straightforward: if the ballots aren’t received until after Election Day, then they weren’t cast by Election Day, and so they cannot be valid. Even if a voter chooses not to cast his ballot himself, instead trusting to a third party, even one as nominally trustworthy as the US Postal Service, the failure to get those ballots into the ballot box remains that voter’s, not the delivering party—even the USPS.
As Joseph Stalin said, it is extremely important who will count the votes and how. It’s imperative for our elections’ integrity that the counting be strictly controlled, especially including limiting the counting to the period beginning after voting precincts close in the State and ending as soon as possible after that, ideally by midnight of Election Day.
