By: The Washington Stand | The Western Journal
A closely-divided U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a critical decision on election integrity, jeopardizing the security of American elections and the sovereignty of the nation. In an opinion released Monday morning in Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC), the court’s narrow majority ruled that mail-in ballots postmarked by election day may still be counted even if received after election day.
“Three federal statutes set the day for the election of Representatives, Senators, and the President,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. At issue is a Mississippi state law allowing ballots received by mail and postmarked by election day to be counted for up to five days after election day. The RNC argued that federal statutes preempt Mississippi’s law and require ballots to be received by election day in order to be counted. Barrett and the majority concluded that the federal statutes “do not” preempt Mississippi’s law.
Interestingly, Barrett noted that early elections were rife with fraud, due to the extended period of time (up to 34 days in some places) that ballots could be cast.
“Fraud, or at least allegations of it, ran rampant — because States could hold elections on different days, voters could travel across the country, casting ballots in multiple States,” the jurist observed. “So Congress intervened, establishing set dates first for presidential elections, then for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, and finally for elections to the U.S. Senate. Today, each of the three election-day statutes sets the day for the ‘election’ on a Tuesday in November.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE WESTERN JOURNAL