The Supreme Court handed Trump an election case defeat. Is a bigger win for him coming?

By Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court’s ruling letting more than a dozen states keep their post-election grace periods for mail ballots is a defeat for President Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the midterms, but the GOP can still capture significant victories in major election-related cases coming further down the pipeline.

On Monday, two Republican-appointees joined the three liberal justices in rejecting GOP claims that federal law did not allow states to count postmarked mail ballots that arrive at election offices after Election Day. The ruling upheld Mississippi’s five-day mail ballot grace period — after the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals had struck it down. It comes after Trump last year tried to unilaterally punish states for counting mail ballots arrived after Election Day.

But in an under-the-radar maneuver, the Supreme Court took up a separate case that could help Trump and Republicans tighten voter rules in the name of preventing noncitizen voting. Next term, the justices will consider reviving parts of an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship for voting. The case — RNC v. Mi Familia Vota — could also give states the green light to conduct mass voter purges of suspected noncitizens in the days and the weeks before an election.

That case won’t likely be settled by the midterms, but stands to be resolved ahead of 2028. It fits into a Trump agenda of pushing for more aggressive action to clamp down on noncitizen voting — which studies have shown to be very rare — even if the tactics risk disenfranchising eligible voters as well.

The mail ballot case decided Monday “favored states’ rights in a way that benefited voters,” said Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Mi Familia favors states’ rights against the interests of voters,” Hasen told CNN.

Both cases come down to interpreting laws passed by Congress, noted Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who served as a White House adviser on voting during the Biden administration. On Monday, the court said that Congress did not intend to restrict ballot-receipt deadlines for mail ballots when it standardized the federal Election Day in November.

The Arizona case is more complicated, Levitt said, because that law in question — the National Voter Registration Act — is less clear than the federal statutes at the center of the ballot deadline case.

“I don’t think (Monday’s ruling) is a harbinger of what the court is going to do on the NVRA,” he said.

A loss for Republicans after they won big on redistricting

Trump and Republicans’ loss on mail ballot deadlines came after they secured a much bigger win earlier this spring, when the Supreme Court gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act and made it much harder for minority voters to challenge redistricting plans on the basis of the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting.

The 6-3 decision by the conservative majority — led by an opinion from Justice Samuel Alito — gives states much more freedom to gerrymander their maps to the detriment of voters of color.

The conservative majority said it was bringing courts’ understanding of the Voting Rights Act in line with the Constitution.

The ruling was quickly used by Republicans to eliminate Democratic-held congressional seats authorized under the Voting Rights Act in states across the South. More maps will be redrawn ahead of the 2028 election in a way that shrinks minority representation — not just at the federal level, but also in state and local elected bodies.

The decision was the third major decision to winnow down the VRA in favor of states’ ability to regulate elections as they see fit. The conservative majority had also, in recent years, shut the door for federal courts to police states for partisan gerrymanders and made it harder to bring constitutional challenges to racial gerrymanders.

“There are all these cases where the court seems to want to be out of the business of dealing with election issues,” said Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Monday’s opinion for the cross-ideological majority in mail ballot deadline case — an opinion written by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett — stressed that it was a “narrow” case that didn’t deal with any constitutional issues.

“The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt and we cannot add to the words Congress chose,” Barrett wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals. Nothing would stop Congress in the future from overriding those state grace periods.

Four conservatives dissented in an opinion written by Alito that claimed the majority’s ruling, by sanctioning post-election mail ballot deadlines, was increasing the risk of election fraud. Barrett’s opinion countered that it was up to legislatures to make those kinds of policy choices, and Congress’ Election Day statute had not imposed a restriction on mail ballot grace periods.

“Federalism is not a partisan issue,” Muller said. “If you are letting the states do different things, sometimes they’re going to benefit Republicans and sometimes they’re going to benefit Democrats.”

Republicans benefited from another move by the justices Monday, when the Supreme Court refused to take up a ruling that OKed a Texas law that bars — with criminal penalties — compensation for individuals or groups that help voters fill out their mail ballots.

However, the GOP got a punt from the high court in another case, coming out of Pennsylvania. Republicans are appealing a decision that struck down the state’s requirement that voters write the date on their mail ballot envelopes. The justices on Monday asked for more briefing on whether they should take up the case, which would could make it easier for states to defend voter restrictions that are challenged in court as unconstitutional.

Tuesday, the court’s final day for releasing opinions, the justices are set to decide a case brought by Republicans seeking to weaken campaign finance limits.

GOP bid for mass voter purges right before elections

Since returning to the White House, Trump has been fixated on exerting more federal control over election administration

Trump responded to Monday’s ruling by demanding that Congress pass his prized piece of elections legislation, the SAVE America Act, which has stalled in the Senate. He wants to use that bill to severely restrict mail voting. But the version of the legislation that has passed in the House is focused on voter ID and citizenship verification of voters.

If it was passed, which appears to be a long shot, it would override parts of the National Voter Registration Act.

In the meantime, the Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling on the Arizona law could determine that ability of states to implement their own statutes that would achieve the same goals on voter proof of citizenship.

“Trump may not get his SAVE Act, but we could get mini-SAVE Acts in lots of Republican states by 2028,” Hasen said.

The most consequential question the court will be considering is whether a provision of the NVRA that bars “systematic” voter removal programs within 90 days of an election applies to purges aimed at suspected non-citizens.

Other states, in addition to Arizona, have tried to conduct such mass purges in the days and weeks before an election. Lower courts have blocked those purges because of the NVRA’s so-called quiet period, but the Supreme Court has previously signaled a different view, having issued an emergency order just days before the 2024 election to let Virginia restart a mass purge aimed at noncitizens.

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