Republican Nat'l Comm. v. Democratic Nat'l Comm.
The Supreme Court blocked a lower court's order that would have let Wisconsin voters mail absentee ballots after election day, ruling the district court overstepped by granting relief no one had asked for and by rewriting election rules on the eve of the vote.
The decision, issued the night before Wisconsin's April 7, 2020 election, reinforced the principle that courts should not change election rules just before an election — even during a public health crisis — and meant that voters who had not yet received their absentee ballots could not wait to cast them.
“Extending the date by which ballots may be cast by voters-not just received by the municipal clerks but cast by voters-for an additional six days after the scheduled election day fundamentally alters the nature of the election.”
The majority's core reason for blocking the district court's order allowing post-election-day postmarks.
How it got here: A federal district court entered a preliminary injunction extending Wisconsin's absentee ballot rules; the Seventh Circuit declined to stay it; the State's intervening defendants brought an emergency stay application to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Wisconsin's April 7, 2020 spring election covered presidential primaries, a state Supreme Court seat, and hundreds of other races. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a massive surge in absentee ballot requests — about one million more than in 2016 — overwhelming election officials and creating a severe backlog. Tens of thousands of voters who had timely requested ballots had not yet received them. A federal district court responded by extending the deadline for election officials to accept completed ballots to April 13, and went further by allowing ballots postmarked after election day to count.
The question before the Court
Could a federal court allow Wisconsin absentee voters to cast ballots postmarked after election day during the COVID-19 pandemic?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court granted the stay, ruling that the district court went too far when it allowed absentee ballots postmarked after election day to count. The district court provided relief no plaintiff had actually requested in its written filings, and the long-established rule against rewriting election procedures on the eve of an election — known as the Purcell principle — required the Supreme Court to correct that error. Allowing voters to cast ballots for six additional days after election day would fundamentally change the nature of the election, and the district court's companion order suppressing publication of results for six days illustrated how far the remedy had drifted.
Under the Court's order, absentee ballots must be either postmarked by April 7, 2020 and received by April 13, or hand-delivered under state law by the close of polls on April 7. The Court stressed it was deciding only this narrow procedural question and was not expressing any view on whether Wisconsin should have held the election at all.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Wisconsin absentee voters who had not yet received their ballots by election day could no longer wait and mail them after April 7 — they had to either vote in person (risking COVID-19 exposure) or lose their vote. The ruling also signaled to lower federal courts nationwide that last-minute election rule changes, even pandemic-driven ones, will face a high bar at the Supreme Court.
What changes now
The stay remains in place pending a full appeal in the Seventh Circuit and any certiorari petition to the Supreme Court. For the April 7 election, absentee ballots must be postmarked by April 7 and received by April 13, or hand-delivered by April 7. If the Seventh Circuit ultimately rules, and certiorari is later denied, the stay terminates automatically. The Court explicitly left open all questions about broader COVID-19 election reforms, which remain to be addressed through other channels.
What this does not decide
The Court explicitly said this ruling expresses no view on whether Wisconsin should have held the election at all, or whether other election procedure changes in light of COVID-19 are appropriate. The decision addresses only the narrow question of the post-election-day postmark rule and does not set rules for future pandemic-era elections.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Ginsburg
“The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic.”The dissent rejecting the majority's framing of the case as a narrow technical procedural question.
Justice Ginsburg argued the Court's order would effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who had timely requested absentee ballots but could not receive, complete, and postmark them by election day due to pandemic-driven backlogs. She contended that the Purcell principle cut the other way — if proximity to the election counseled caution when the district court acted several days earlier, the Supreme Court's own intervention the night before the election was even more inappropriate. She would have left the district court's order undisturbed, noting its result-suppression order addressed concerns about releasing early returns.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the Purcell principle — the rule, drawn from a 2006 per curiam decision, that lower federal courts should ordinarily not change election rules on the eve of an election because last-minute judicial alterations create confusion and undermine election integrity. When a lower court violates that principle, the Supreme Court should step in to correct the error.
- A threshold problem was that the district court granted relief no plaintiff had asked for in its written preliminary-injunction motions. Although the majority noted the argument was not necessarily forfeited, the plaintiffs themselves saw no need to request that ballots postmarked after election day be counted — which revealed how extraordinary that remedy was.
- Allowing voters to mail and postmark ballots for six days after election day does not merely extend an administrative receipt deadline; it extends the window in which voters can actually cast votes, which the Court viewed as fundamentally altering the character of the election itself.
- The district court's effort to manage the consequences of its own order — by separately enjoining anyone from releasing election results for six days after election day, effectively binding non-parties to the lawsuit — illustrated the cascading problems with the post-election-day postmark relief, and underscored the wisdom of the Purcell principle.
- The Court treated the already-granted extension of the receipt deadline (from April 7 to April 13) as the appropriate remedy. That extension effectively gave voters until Tuesday, April 7 to mail their ballots rather than the prior de facto deadline of Saturday, April 4, and reflected the relief plaintiffs had actually sought. The district court's additional layer of relief was unnecessary and contrary to established precedent.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Purcell v. Gonzalez (549 U.S. 1)
The majority leans heavily on Purcell's rule that courts should not change election procedures just before an election.