{"id":379914,"date":"2026-06-29T23:24:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T23:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/379914\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T23:24:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T23:24:14","slug":"supreme-court-ruling-allows-california-to-continue-accepting-ballots-after-election-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/379914\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Ruling Allows California to Continue Accepting Ballots After Election Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

California\u2019s law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive up to a week later will stand after the court\u2019s ruling in Watson v. RNC.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Ballots are sorted the day after California’s primary election at the L.A. County Ballot Processing Center on June 3, 2026, in City of Industry, California.\u00a0(Jae C. Hong\/AP Photo)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Supreme Court\u2019s ruling today was a win for voting rights,\u201d Sen. Alex Padilla said at a news conference Monday morning in San Francisco. \u201cAnd I think a clear message is that Donald Trump does not control elections. It\u2019s the people who drive our democracy, not this president who has a tendency to overreach.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the court\u2019s 5-4 decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote that the Election Day laws written by Congress only established a uniform day of voting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,\u201d Barrett wrote.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe U.S. Supreme Court on April 7, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kayla Bartkowski\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Barrett\u2019s opinion was joined by justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts.<\/p>\n

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented.<\/p>\n

\u201cAllowing absentee ballots to pour in over the days and weeks after election day, by which point preliminary election returns are being publicly reported, creates greater opportunity for fraud and risks further undermining the public\u2019s confidence in election integrity,\u201d Alito wrote.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump called the ruling \u201ca tremendous loss\u201d in a social media post<\/a>, and he urged Congress to pass legislation that would require voter identification and limit mail-in voting. The Trump administration filed a \u201cfriend of the court\u201d brief in the Watson case, supporting the RNC.<\/p>\n

During oral arguments in March, Alito pointed to arguments that late-arriving ballots can also erode public confidence by slowing down the counting of votes.<\/p>\n

In reality, the prolonged vote count in California is the result<\/a> of the large numbers of vote-by-mail ballots received before the end of Election Day.<\/p>\n

Three days after the June 2 primary, California election officials reported 2.5 million uncounted ballots received through Election Day, compared to under 400,000 uncounted ballots received in the days after.<\/p>\n

Election officials have spent years urging voters to return their ballots early \u2014 or to a ballot dropbox \u2014 to avoid missing the postmark deadline.<\/p>\n

Still, in the 2024 general election, 406,132 ballots were received after Election Day in California, accounting for 2.5% of the overall turnout.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s still a lot of ballots and a lot of voters, and so we\u2019re really relieved to know that our grace period is protected,\u201d said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.<\/p>\n

\"\"Election workers receive vote-by-mail ballots to be tallied at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder\/County Clerk Ballot Processing Center on May 28, 2026. (Gary Coronado\/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The state budget agreement announced by Newsom and legislative leaders on Friday sets aside<\/a> $29 million to help counties hire staff and purchase equipment to help speed up the counting of ballots, as well as $10 million for the secretary of state and counties to encourage voters to return their ballots early.<\/p>\n

Alexander said challenges to California\u2019s vote-by-mail system will continue beyond the Watson case \u2014 including the Trump administration\u2019s effort to have the U.S. Postal Service check vote-by-mail ballots against a list of eligible voters.<\/p>\n

The order, which is currently being challenged<\/a> in court by California, was blasted by Democratic senators in a letter last week<\/a> as an effort to \u201callow USPS to adjudicate who can and cannot vote by mail.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that while this [Watson] decision is great news for California voters and California elections, we aren\u2019t out of the woods yet with regards to the U.S. Postal Service,\u201d Alexander said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California\u2019s law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive up to a week later will stand after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-379914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}