A majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical of state laws that allow the counting of ballots days and weeks after Election Day, based on the questions they asked during oral arguments.

One comment by Justice Samuel Alito seemed to resonate with several justices when he said, “Independence DAY, birthDAY, and Election DAY. They are all particular DAYS. So if we start with that, if I have nothing more to look at than the phrase ‘Election Day,’ I think this is the DAY in which everything is going to take place.”

Justice Elena Kagan disagreed, stating that Alito’s logic could also render early voting illegal. The Republican National Committee countered that its lawsuit against Mississippi only targets the five-day post-election grace period for receiving ballots that were postmarked by Election Day.

Several conservative justices raised concerns about allowing ballots to arrive after Election Day, including whether voters could recall ballots once they’ve shipped them but before they arrive at election offices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned whether late-arriving ballots risk undermining election confidence.

“The longer after Election Day any significant changes in vote totals take place, the greater the risk that the losing side will cry the election has been stolen,” Kavanaugh said, quoting from an analysis by a New York University law professor.

Fox News reported that 29 states have some form of a grace period to receive ballots after polls close on Election Day.

The case reaches the Supreme Court amid a broader national debate over mail-in voting. Last year, four Republican-led states eliminated ballot receipt grace periods, and lawmakers in Congress are considering proposals that would further restrict voting by mail.

The discussion comes as the Senate debates election legislation backed by Donald Trump that would impose new nationwide voting requirements. The measure, known as the SAVE Act, faces long odds in the Senate due to the filibuster.

Paul Clement, representing the Republican National Committee, argued that the possibility of election outcomes changing due to ballots received after Election Day would be unacceptable to losing candidates.

Following the 2020 election, Donald Trump called on election officials not to count ballots that arrived after Election Day, though several states continued processing such ballots in accordance with their laws.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late-arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite, a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result. Full stop,” Clement told the justices.

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican defending the state’s law, argues that federal statutes permit ballots cast by Election Day to be received and counted afterward. In court filings, attorneys for Watson contend that both legal and historical precedent support that interpretation, maintaining that states can determine ballots are finalized when submitted rather than when they are received.

During arguments, the justices appeared divided along ideological lines. Conservative members of the court expressed skepticism toward ballot receipt grace periods, while liberal justices were more receptive to the state’s position. Conservatives currently hold a 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court.

“It seems to me that we have a very long history of states having a variety of different ballot receipt deadlines, to include after Election Day,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart informed the court that the dispute centers on whether a law enacted by Congress in 1845 prohibited states from counting ballots that were cast by Election Day but submitted afterward. “No one challenged it until now,” Stewart said.

Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, on Monday won a Supreme Court order that is expected to lead to the dismissal of his criminal conviction for refusing to testify to Congress.

Prodded by the Trump administration, the justices threw out an appellate ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol.

The move frees a trial judge to act on the Republican administration’s pending request to dismiss Bannon’s conviction and indictment “in the interests of justice.”

The dismissal would be largely symbolic. Bannon served a four-month prison term after a jury convicted him of contempt of Congress in 2022. A federal appeals court in Washington had upheld the conviction.

The justices also issued a similar order in the case of former Cincinnati Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld, who was pardoned by Trump last year.

Sittenfeld had served 16 months in federal prison after a jury convicted him of bribery and attempted extortion in 2022. The high court order allows a lower court to consider dismissing his indictment.

The Justice Department brought the case against Bannon during Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency, but it changed course after Trump took office again last year.

Bannon had initially argued that his testimony was protected by Trump’s claim of executive privilege. But the House panel and the Justice Department contended such a claim was dubious because Trump had fired Bannon from the White House in 2017 and Bannon was thus a private citizen when he was consulting with the then-president in the run-up to the Capitol riot.

Bannon separately has pleaded guilty in a New York state court to defrauding donors to a private effort to build a wall on the U.S. southern border, as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid jail time. That conviction is unaffected by the Supreme Court action.