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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.
However, voting patterns in 2026 may not look the same as they did in 2024. Voter-education efforts are already underway in some states to urge mail-ballot voters to return their ballots earlier in the future, likely shrinking the number of voters who could be harmed by these changes.
4 red states have already changed their mail ballot deadlines
In the 2024 election, several states allowed mail ballots to arrive after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by then. But in 2025, in line with Trump’s executive order, four of those states — Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah — reversed course and enacted laws making Election Day the deadline for ballots to be received. Other states are considering similar changes. A bill to eliminate the grace period recently passed the state House in West Virginia.
All four states that changed their laws are fully controlled by the GOP. Republicans control both legislative chambers and the governorship in North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah, and they have supermajorities in both chambers in Kansas, allowing them to override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.
Despite Democratic objections to these changes, the number of voters affected should be very low. Data is not available on the number of ballots that arrived after Election Day 2024 in North Dakota and Utah, but in Ohio and Kansas, relatively few voters took advantage of this grace period.
In Ohio, just 7,579 mail ballots were received after Election Day and counted, representing just 0.1% of the state’s total votes cast that year. An additional 1,944 mail ballots were received after Election Day but didn’t count, either because they arrived too late after Election Day or for some other reason.
In Kansas, only 2,110 ballots were received and accepted after Election Day, or 0.2% of the total vote. An additional 603 ballots arrived too late to count, and 104 ballots that arrived after Election Day were also rejected because they lacked any postmark whatsoever.
As low as they are, these numbers could decrease even further in future elections. Election officials are already working to inform voters in these states of the new deadline, which will hopefully lead to them returning their ballots earlier. For instance, officials in Wyandotte County, Kansas, told a local news outlet they would be telling voters about the new rules via postcard. In Utah, election officials are advising voters to make use of dropboxes if they are worried their ballot will not be delivered in time via the mail.
But the changes are causing issues in at least one state. Local election officials in Ohio are warning that that state’s new deadline could put additional strain on election offices and require that they hire more workers to process ballots.
Postmark delays could affect mail ballots
Even with the above changes, there are still 15 jurisdictions, representing 43% of 2024 voters, that allow mail ballots to arrive “late” — as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. But late last year, the U.S. Postal Service caused a stir when it issued new guidance declaring that mail might not be postmarked on the same day it is dropped off.
In other words, even if a voter mails their ballot on Election Day, it may not be postmarked until the next day — which would lead to its rejection.
The Postal Service clarified that the new guidance “does not change any existing postal operations or postmarking practices”; it has long been the case that mail is postmarked only once it reaches a processing facility, not necessarily on the day that it’s dropped off at a mailbox or post office. However, the Postal Service did say these lags have become more common following 2025 changes to its collection procedures.
It’s difficult to say how many ballots will be affected by these changes in 2026. Votebeat doesn’t have data on how many ballots were dropped off in 2024 on Election Day itself, and it’s unclear how many more of those ballots might receive delayed postmarks than in 2024. But the number of ballots that arrived after Election Day but were still counted in 2024 can serve as a reasonable ceiling for the number of ballots at risk.
In some places, that number was very small, according to data from state and local officials. For instance, in Mississippi, 1,140 ballots arrived after Election Day that were postmarked on time and accepted. That was just 0.1% of the total votes cast in the state that year. In Washington, D.C., that number was 1,062 ballots, or 0.3% of the total votes cast. In Oregon, it was approximately 13,000 ballots, or 0.6% of the total vote. In West Virginia, it was a tiny 449 ballots, or 0.1% of the total vote.
Barring major changes to voters’ ballot-delivery habits in 2026, the postmark changes should have only minuscule effects on elections in these places.
In other states, these numbers are higher, but they’re still relatively small. In Illinois, 106,521 ballots arrived after Election Day that were postmarked on time and accepted, or 1.9% of the total votes cast in the state. In California, 373,116 ballots arrived after Election Day with valid postmarks (although some of those were rejected for other reasons, like a bad signature), or 2.3% of the state’s total vote. Washington had the highest share of its ballots arrive after Election Day properly postmarked: 3.0%, or approximately 120,000 ballots.
So if voters in these states return their mail ballots in 2026 on the same schedule as they did in 2024, around 2-3% of their voters are at risk of being disenfranchised due to the new postmark rules. But that doesn’t mean they will definitely be disenfranchised. Some of these ballots were certainly mailed before Election Day, meaning they would still likely be postmarked on time even if not the day they were dropped off. And, of course, even some of the ballots mailed on Election Day may still be postmarked on time, given that the new policy doesn’t preclude ballots from being postmarked on the day they are mailed.
There’s one more big caveat: Voters in 2026 probably won’t return their mail ballots on the same schedule as they did in 2024. Many of them will likely hear about the new postmark guidance and decide to return their ballots earlier, use a ballot drop box or bring them to a post office and request a manual postmark (which remains an option for voters afraid of processing delays).
States have also started educating voters about the changes. For instance, Oregon updated its guidance in October to tell voters to mail their ballots a week ahead of time, or else to use a drop box. Many states that do not accept ballots after Election Day, such as Pennsylvania, engage in voter-education campaigns each cycle to make sure voters return their ballots on time
(There’s one other possibility here too. Because the new postmark guidance isn’t actually a change in how post offices operate, it’s possible that many of the ballots that will be rejected as a result of it have already been going uncounted due to late postmarks. Thankfully, this does not appear to be a major issue based on the limited public data available from 2024. Only a few states keep track of how many mail ballots are rejected because of invalid postmarks, but in Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, those numbers were just 0.04%, 0.22%, and 0.12% of the electorate, respectively.)
The Supreme Court could require ballots to arrive on Election Day
Finally, it’s also possible that the 15 remaining jurisdictions that accept mail ballots after Election Day will be forced to join Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Utah in discarding the practice by the 2026 midterms. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a challenge to Mississippi’s law allowing properly postmarked ballots to be counted if they are received within five business days of Election Day.
Opponents of the state law, which include the Republican National Committee, argue that allowing the ballots to be counted conflicts with federal law, which says that federal elections are to be held the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, and that counting ballots that arrive after this date risks “chaos and suspicions of impropriety.”
Mississippi argues an “election” is the “conclusive choice” of voters, and voters make that choice by Election Day, even if election officials don’t receive the paper evidence of that choice until a few days later.
Arguments in the case are expected on March 23, with a ruling by early July.
If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Mississippi, it could ban the counting of all ballots received after Election Day nationwide as well, regardless of postmark date. As detailed above, that would still impact only a small percentage of ballots — between 0.1% and 3%, depending on the state. But it would, on average, be more than in Kansas and Ohio, as well as more than would be affected by the new postmark guidance alone.
Officials in the 15 jurisdictions that could be affected are concerned about how voters would adapt.
“Such a ruling would impact our [military and overseas] voters, who have had that additional mailing time for decades, and our Legislature would need to choose how to reconcile that with our absentee ballot laws,” said Debra O’Malley, director of communications for the secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Spokespeople for both the Illinois State Board of Elections and Washington secretary of state’s office said their respective states were monitoring the case. A ruling that bans the acceptance of ballots that arrive after Election Day would likely require election officials to undertake a large-scale voter reeducation campaign in the states where the practice is still allowed.
“We’re aware of that potential but at this point there’s not a concrete plan for adapting to the ruling,” Matt Dietrich, the Illinois spokesman, wrote in an email. “But we’re certainly prepared to help our election authorities and voters adapt should the ruling affect General Election mail deadlines.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
