November 11, 2025

Democracy Docket’s origin story is rooted in making mail-in voting work for voters. Two weeks after Democracy Docket launched in 2020, I wrote about the need to ensure that voters casting ballots by mail were not disenfranchised. I outlined four specific protections that states should adopt to safeguard the voting rights of their citizens.

That piece — Four Pillars to Safeguard Vote By Mail — became an instant rallying cry for the pro-democracy movement. Within weeks, it inspired lawsuits to implement the “four pillars” and a political effort to educate voters about the risks that their ballots could be rejected.

One of the four ideas I advanced in that piece was the need to ensure that voters who cast their ballots by mail prior to Election Day would have their votes counted, even if the ballots arrived a day or two afterward. My argument was clear: no one should be disenfranchised by slow mail service.

Initially, this suggestion was viewed as noncontroversial. We were in the midst of a dangerous pandemic, and both blue and red states were trying to ensure that their voters could safely cast ballots. Most importantly, Donald Trump had not yet attacked mail-in voting.

Against that backdrop, Mississippi enacted a new voting law allowing mail-in ballots returned before Election Day to be counted as long as they were received within five business days after the election. The bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support and was signed into law by the Republican governor.

That was, of course, before mail-in balloting became one of the most contentious battle lines in the Republican war on voting. It was before Republicans began altering state laws to limit who could vote by mail and whose ballots would be counted — and before Trump’s persistent lies about mail-in voting and his threats to ban it.

Yet even as the Republican Party and its allied organizations waged multimillion-dollar legal campaigns to make voting by mail more difficult and to increase the rejection of lawful ballots, Mississippi’s law remained largely unnoticed.

That changed in 2024, when the RNC sued Mississippi to invalidate its postmark-date provision. The case was odd from the start. After all, Mississippi was not a battleground state in the 2024 elections. And if the RNC truly wanted the law changed, it seemed clear that it could simply ask the state legislature to repeal it — and the state would likely oblige.

That case — Watson v. RNC — has now made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yesterday, the Court granted review of the Fifth Circuit’s decision in favor of the RNC, putting the question of mail-ballot receipt deadlines squarely before the high court in time for the 2026 midterms.

Several months ago, I wrote in a premium newsletter that my hunch was that “Republicans want this case to move forward for reasons unrelated to Mississippi.” My suspicion was that they wanted “to use this as a vehicle to have the U.S. Supreme Court undermine mail-in voting and potentially early voting around the country.”

The RNC’s lawsuit does little to hide its motivation for discarding thousands of otherwise lawful votes: “Mail-in ballots from Democratic voters also tend to arrive late,” the RNC admits, and therefore Mississippi’s postmark deadline “specifically and disproportionately harms Republican candidates.”

If Republicans thought they could score an easy win by suing a friendly state, they thought wrong. They didn’t count on my law firm representing groups that would intervene to defend the law — but that’s exactly what happened.

Shortly after the RNC filed its lawsuit, my team joined the case on behalf of the Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans and the Vet Voice Foundation. We have aggressively fought this effort to deny voters their most fundamental right. And when the case goes before the Supreme Court, we will be there to continue the fight.

I have litigated and won four cases before the Supreme Court. My fifth argument is scheduled for Dec. 9, when I will defend a campaign finance law that has been on the books for 50 years. I took the case after Donald Trump’s Department of Justice broke with decades of precedent and refused to defend this cornerstone of our campaign finance system.

As in that case, the plaintiff in the mail-in ballot case is an arm of the national Republican Party.

I have no doubt that the DOJ will side with the RNC in this case — despite the law and its past positions. I also don’t know what position Mississippi will ultimately take in defense of its own law.

While it might seem unthinkable for a state to refuse to defend its own statute before the Supreme Court, we recently watched Louisiana do exactly that in the Voting Rights Act case Callais v. Louisiana. In the age of Trump, I’ve learned that anything is possible.

But Republicans have also learned a hard lesson: my law firm and I fight hard for our clients. We never back down. And whether it’s on Democracy Docket’s website or before the Supreme Court, I will always stand by my four pillars, defending voting rights and free and fair elections.