How many voters could be affected by earlier mail ballot deadlines? We ran the numbers.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping attempts to overhaul the way U.S. elections are run have mostly run into dead ends in the courts. But his administration and allies have successfully tightened rules around at least one of his biggest pet peeves: the counting of mail ballots that are received after Election Day.
Since the 2024 election, four states — all Republican-controlled — have changed their election laws so that they no longer accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. And while 14 states and Washington, D.C., still do so as long as those ballots are postmarked by Election Day, more of those ballots could be rejected in future elections due to recent changes to U.S. Postal Service procedures. To top it all off, a pending U.S. Supreme Court case could make it illegal for any jurisdiction to count ballots that arrive after Election Day, period.
Taken together, these changes have the potential to impact, and even disenfranchise, thousands of voters. At the same time, the share of voters whose ballots may be affected constitute only a small fraction of the overall electorate, according to a Votebeat review of data on mail ballots arriving after Election Day.
Votebeat contacted the 19 jurisdictions where voters in the 2024 general election could return their ballots after Election Day and still have them counted. Across the 13 that provided information, more than 750,000 ballots were received after Election Day, representing 0.1-3.1% of the total turnout in those states.
https://www.votebeat.org/2026/02/11/how-many-mail-voters-absentee-ballots-arrive-after-election-day-2024-2026-postmark-supreme-court/
