Mary Ellen Klas: The irony of the RNC’s latest election lawsuit

The U,S, Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case brought by the Republican National Committee against Mississippi, challenging its law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted after Election Day. The RNC argues accepting mail-in ballots that were postmarked on or before Election Day, but that arrived in election offices after that date, “undermines trust in elections.” It’s a specious argument.

The lawsuit was needed, the RNC argues, “to enforce safeguards for mail-in voting.” But the real motivation is simpler: Trump is obsessed with the fact he lost the 2020 election. So he continues to claim – despite evidence – U.S. elections aren’t secure and mail-in ballots are riddled with fraud.

Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t buy it. Over the last 20 years, protocols have been adopted in every state that make mail-in voting secure and reliable. It’s true that ballots often don’t get counted but that’s because, too often, the increasingly unreliable postal service – whose funding has been slashed under Trump – hasn’t delivered ballots by the deadline for counting. But the practice remains an important option for millions of voters with disabilities who cannot vote in person, for voters in rural areas, and for Americans who live and work overseas.

Trump has tried to end mail-in balloting since 2016 when he lost Colorado to Hillary Clinton as that state launched its first all-mail election. He has since advanced conspiracy theories about widespread vote fraud and, every time the facts overtake his claims, he comes up with a new claim to perpetuate doubt.

In March, Trump signed an executive order pressuring states to reject mail-in ballots received after Election Day. It directed the independent U.S. Election Assistance Commission to withhold federal funding from states that didn’t comply. It was just one of many attempts at executive overreach with which Trump is trying to control state elections – even though the U.S. Constitution gives states the primary responsibility for regulating and administering them.

The portion of the order related to mail-in ballots was blocked by a federal court in Massachusetts, but the lawsuit gives the Trump administration an opening to achieve through the back door what it couldn’t with the order: new hurdles to mail-in voting, the disenfranchisement of millions of voters (many of whom, it is worth noting, are Republican), and an opportunity to raise doubts about the outcome of the midterm elections.

At least sixteen states, including big red states like Texas and Ohio, allow for some sort of grace period after Election Day for ballots to arrive and be counted – as long as they were postmarked on the day of the election. The RNC is asking the court to determine the meaning of “Election Day,” suggesting that a ballot is only legitimate if arrives in the custody of the state by Election Day – even if the vote was legally cast on or before that day. Mississippi argues that Congress set the date of the election with the intention of designating the day when voters must make their choices, not the day when ballots must be in the hands of the election counters.

The irony of the RNC arguing to invalidate the Mississippi law is rich here. Ever since George W. Bush’s narrow victory over Al Gore in 2000, Republicans have been encouraging their high-propensity voters to cast ballots by mail or vote early so they could “bank votes.” Mailed ballots allowed the party to produce higher turnouts and reliable victories. For decades, it was one of the key components of the Republican Party’s electoral success in Trump’s adopted state of Florida.

Even in 2020, when Trump was bad-mouthing vote-by-mail, the Florida GOP was desperate to promote it as a safe way for voters to register and vote in the midst of the pandemic.

“Absentee balloting, also known as Vote-by-Mail is safe and secure,” Joe Gruters, the former chair of the Republican Party of Florida who now heads the RNC, told Politico in July of 2020.

But Trump hadn’t made it easy for him. The president had sent out a tweet that appeared to confuse all-mail voting – in which states send a ballot to every registered voter and implement elaborate safety protocols to tabulate them – with absentee and mail-in voting, in which voters request a ballot and cast it by mail or in drop boxes.

Instead of correcting Trump’s tweet, the Republican Party of Florida decided to use part of the president’s quote that suggested he supported “absentee voting” in a mailer, but it conveniently blurred out the part where he wrote that “Mail-in-voting, on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt Election in USA history.”

Now, once again, the Republican Party is caught between the truth and the president’s unsubstantiated claims. It’s not alone. The U.S. Department of Justice, which under former President Joe Biden had sided with the state of Mississippi in defending its law, is now all-in for throwing the law out. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted on Monday: “Election Day means Election DAY! Stay tuned!”

But Mississippi – a state in which Trump won in 2024 by nearly 23 percentage points – hasn’t changed its argument. If the court sides with the RNC and rejects grace periods for legitimate ballots, it will “have destabilizing nationwide ramifications,” lawyers for Mississippi argued in their petition. Election laws in most states would be scrapped, they warned, and “breakneck litigation” would lead to “electoral chaos.”

Chaos is how Trump rolls. But it’s no way to run an election.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.