For Mississippians, there’s been no escaping the attempts to dilute Black political power.
Two Black Democrats won special elections on Nov. 4 to break the Republican supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Then, six days later, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a Republican-led challenge to mail-in voting.
Johnny DuPree and Theresa Gillespie Isom both won seats in races that had been forced after federal judges ordered redistricting to give Black residents better representation in the state government.
“Your voice matters. Your vote makes a difference. Together, we’re shaping a better Mississippi,” members of Mississippi Votes, a civic engagement organization, wrote in a social media post.
Similarly, in a statement about the wins of “pro-democracy candidates in Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and New York,” officials with Black Voters Matter, a community empowerment organization, wrote that “the people stood up for democracy and won.” They also noted that people “have the power to fight back against an authoritarian takeover and demand free and fair elections.”
But then, the Supreme Court announced that justices would examine a challenge to a Mississippi law allowing a five-day grace period for ballots mailed by Election Day. This followed the court signaling in October that it was open to a Republican lawmaker’s challenge to the grace period that Illinois allows for mail-in ballots.
Mississippi is, notably, the state with the greatest proportion of Black people: 38%. The court will decide whether mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day, or whether they must be postmarked by that date and can arrive within a specified grace period afterward.
The case could have significant implications for Black voters not just in Mississippi but also in more than a dozen other states and Washington, D.C., that have grace periods for mail-in voting. Black voters have traditionally faced a variety of barriers to in-person voting — including longer wait times and polling location changes — that advocates say make having a mail-in voting option crucial.
“Striking down Mississippi’s law would mandate massive nationwide overhauls of essential post-election activities and destabilize election administration,” Joshua Tom, the legal director of the ACLU of Mississippi, told Capital B.
“This would not only mean that [mail-in ballots] must be received on or before Election Day, but it would also mean that collecting, tallying, and every other post-election processing of timely cast ballots and certifying election results couldn’t occur after Election Day.”
Read on to learn more about the origin of the Mississippi law, the potential nationwide ripple effects of overturning it — and what may come next.
What led to the voting law’s passage in Mississippi?
The measure was adopted in 2020 to ensure voter safety and access to the ballot box during the COVID-19 pandemic. A tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute, found that 29 states as well as the District of Columbia took steps that year to put in place such protections.
But these laws quickly came under fire by President Donald Trump. Even before Election Day in 2020, Trump questioned the legitimacy of the contest, claiming without evidence that mail-in voting — which is how he has voted before — is rife with “fraud like you have never seen.”
Joined by the Mississippi Republican Party — which has echoed Trump’s baseless claims — and others, the Republican National Committee in 2024 challenged the state law in federal court. U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola ruled against them.
“Congress set a national election day to avoid the ‘evils’ of burdening citizens with multiple election days and of risking undue influence upon voters in one state from the announced tallies in states voting earlier,” Guirola said, “Neither of those concerns is raised by allowing a reasonable interval for ballots cast and postmarked by election day to arrive by mail.”
The challengers then took the case to the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, widely considered one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the U.S. The court reversed Guirola’s decision in 2024.
In June of this year, Mississippi state officials appealed to the Supreme Court, which announced this month that it would hear the case.
A group that includes 19 states as well as the District of Columbia filed an amicus brief that supports Mississippi, calling the 5th Circuit ruling “wrong and destabilizing” and arguing that “last-minute election-related limbo is the last thing states and courts need.” The case highlights tensions between Mississippi Republicans and the Republican National Committee, with the latter opposing the appeal to the Supreme Court.
Could the justices’ decision have ripple effects that extend beyond Mississippi?
While the details differ, 16 states and the District of Columbia accept late-arriving ballots as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan association of public officials that provides data on legislatures in all 50 states.
Those 16 states are Alaska, California, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.
Having a robust mail-in voting system is vital for vulnerable communities, Dan Vicuña, the senior policy director of voting and fair representation at Common Cause, a policy watchdog group, told Capital B. Vicuña said that this has become especially true as voters in parts of the country have seen greater movement toward suppression tactics, such as the closure of polling locations in heavily Black areas, which can make casting a ballot in person a challenge.
“We know that Black voters across the country wait longer to vote in person, which makes it less likely that someone is going to be able to have the time to go out and cast a ballot,” Vicuña said. “So, having a usable vote-by-mail system is incredibly important.”
He added that eliminating the grace period for ballots arriving after Election Day has “no value in terms of preventing fraud in the system” and is “simply a needless barrier to allowing people to have their voices count” in the country’s democracy.
“If there’s a ruling that constrains the right to vote by saying that a ballot has to arrive by Election Day, that’s going to have a huge ripple effect nationwide,” Vicuña said. “This case might not get the same headlines [as other Supreme Court cases], but the boring-sounding work of election administration is important.”
What happens next?
Oral arguments are expected to take place in early 2026, and the court will likely issue a decision by the end of the term in June.
The Mississippi case arrives as the Supreme Court is deciding another consequential voting rights case out of Louisiana. The court will decide if it’s a violation of the U.S. Constitution to take race into account during the redistricting process, including when a voting map is redrawn to accurately reflect the demographics of a state. That Louisiana decision also is expected by the end of June.
The court’s conservative justices have signaled a willingness to dismantle Louisiana’s brand-new majority-Black congressional district, even as residents have highlighted the significance of fair representation.
“I’ve had the experience of not having a voice — and now an opportunity to have a voice,” said Ambrose Sims from the steps of the Supreme Court in October before oral arguments.
Sim, who helped to establish the West Feliciana Parish NAACP and is involved in the legal dispute, added, “That’s what brings me here today.”
Françoise N. Hamlin, a history and Africana studies professor at Brown University, told Capital B that it’s impossible to separate the Louisiana and Mississippi cases involving elections and voting.
Hamlin said that her blood pressure shoots up whenever she thinks about all the ways that access to the ballot box has been undermined in recent years — and the fact that the effort to eliminate the Mississippi law is only the latest attempt.
“It’s a full-on attack not only on Black political power but also on democracy,” said Hamlin, who’s the author of the 2012 book Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II. “And if the claim of democracy is that all voices are heard, then there’s no reason for this law to be overturned.”