Voter suppression is about to get so much worse

In the judicial equivalent of a Friday night news dump, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dropped a decision that paves the way for the next frontier in voter suppression. A three-judge panel of Trump appointees—James Ho, Kyle Duncan, and Andrew Oldham—gleefully tossed out one of the pillars of federalism in their zeal to help Republicans win elections whether people support them or not.

Mississippi has—well, had—a law that required the state to count absentee ballots received up to five days after Election Day if they were postmarked before or on the day of the election. The state made that change to its election laws during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they kept it on the books. 

If you’re not brain-poisoned with right-wing propaganda about stolen elections, a law like this just makes sense. The person still has to have cast a ballot by Election Day. This way, their vote won’t be invalidated just because the United States Postal Service is somehow incapable of getting ballots to election centers within the three-to-five-day range they promise. Eighteen states—plus Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.—have laws like this.

These days, Republicans who have marinated in the Trump fever swamp of voter fraud allegations hate laws like this. They’re committed to their worldview that mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud because that’s what Trump thinks, despite evidence showing that voter fraud such as double voting is vanishingly small.