Moore v. Circosta
The Court refused to block North Carolina's State Board of Elections from letting absentee ballots received up to six days after election day be counted — leaving the extension in place for the November 2020 election. The one-line order gave no reasons; three justices dissented, arguing only the legislature has authority under the Constitution to set election deadlines.
How it got here: A state court and the Board extended the ballot receipt deadline via consent decree; a Fourth Circuit en banc majority declined to block it; Republican legislative leaders asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief.
The Case in Depth
What happened
North Carolina's General Assembly passed laws specifically tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic for the 2020 election, including setting a rule that absentee ballots must arrive no more than three days after election day. The State Board of Elections, acting through a consent decree with a state court, extended that deadline to six days after election day — November 12. Republican legislative leaders sued, arguing the Board had no authority to override the legislature's deadline.
The question before the Court
Could Republican legislative leaders get the Supreme Court to block North Carolina's election board from extending the absentee ballot receipt deadline beyond what the state legislature had enacted?
The Court's answer
No — the Court declined to block the extension, issuing a single-sentence denial with no written reasoning.
Three justices — Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito — disagreed and would have blocked the extension. They argued that the federal Elections Clause gives authority over federal election rules to state legislatures and Congress specifically, not to other state actors like the Board of Elections. They also contended that North Carolina's own constitution and statutes gave the Board no power to override a deadline the General Assembly had deliberately chosen to keep even after accounting for the pandemic's challenges.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Absentee ballots in North Carolina received through November 12 — six days after the election — were eligible to be counted. The order left unresolved the broader question of whether state election boards can override ballot deadlines set by a state legislature, a question with implications for every future election administration dispute.
What changes now
With the application denied, the Board's extended deadline remained in effect, allowing absentee ballots postmarked by election day and received by November 12 to be counted in the 2020 election. This was a temporary emergency ruling, not a final decision on the merits. The underlying constitutional question — whether election boards can override legislatively set ballot deadlines — was left unresolved.
What this does not decide
This order does not decide whether the Board's deadline extension was lawful or unconstitutional under the Elections Clause or state law. It only declined to pause the extension on an emergency basis. No opinion was written explaining the Court's view of the merits.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas noted he would have granted the application to block the Board's extended deadline. He wrote no opinion explaining his reasoning.
Dissent — Justice Gorsuch
“Such last-minute changes by largely unaccountable bodies, too, invite confusion, risk altering election outcomes, and in the process threaten voter confidence in the results.”Gorsuch explaining why letting non-legislative bodies rewrite election rules at the last minute is harmful to democracy.
Justice Gorsuch argued the Board had no authority — under the federal Elections Clause or under North Carolina's own constitution and statutes — to extend the legislatively enacted ballot receipt deadline. The General Assembly had deliberately chosen to keep the three-day deadline even after considering COVID's challenges, and no provision of state law gave the Board a blank check to override that choice through a consent decree. He warned that last-minute election-rule rewrites by unaccountable bodies invite confusion, threaten voter confidence, and undermine the constitutional design that places election lawmaking in legislative hands.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court was asked to grant emergency injunctive relief — in effect, a pause on the Board's extended deadline — while the legal challenge played out. Such relief requires showing, at minimum, a likelihood of winning the underlying legal argument. The majority issued no explanation for its denial.
- The dissent led by Justice Gorsuch focused first on the federal Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4), which gives the power to set the 'Times, Places and Manner' of federal elections to state legislatures and Congress — not to other state bodies. Because the Board is not the legislature, Gorsuch argued it could not unilaterally rewrite the deadline the General Assembly had chosen.
- The dissent also examined North Carolina's own laws governing the Board. State law lets the Board issue regulations only if they do not conflict with existing statutes. A separate emergency-powers provision requires three conditions: a disruption to the normal election schedule, a natural disaster causing that disruption, and an action that does not unnecessarily conflict with state law. Gorsuch concluded that none of those three conditions were met — the State could run its election normally on November 3, and the General Assembly had already addressed COVID's challenges when it set the three-day receipt deadline.
- Gorsuch drew a parallel to Democratic National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature, a case decided days earlier in which the Court had declined to extend Wisconsin's ballot receipt deadline. He argued the same principles applied here — and that this case was arguably worse because a state court and the Board acted together to override a carefully considered legislative response to the pandemic.
- Because the majority issued no written opinion, it did not publicly explain why the emergency standard was not met or why those arguments were insufficient.