Absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 3, 2026, and received by Nov. 10 will count in Mississippi’s general election. That window was preserved in a U.S. Supreme Court case that the Secretary of State’s office won on June 29. This will be the first federal election under the court’s decision.
Mississippi requires a reason to vote absentee. The office of the Secretary of State’s guide lists eight categories of voters who may do so in person at the circuit clerk’s office, including students and people required to work during polling hours. Only four categories may do it by mail: voters temporarily outside their county; voters with a temporary or permanent physical disability; people caring for a hospitalized disabled relative; and anyone 65 or older.
Those are the voters afforded the five-day window. The application and the envelope both must be witnessed by a notary unless the voter is disabled.
The Secretary of State’s office reported on Oct. 5 that voters had requested 15,170 absentee ballots and that 14,771 had gone out. The office had received 9,761 back. That left about 5,000 ballots in circulation, and any of them postmarked on Nov. 3 can arrive and be counted through the following week.
The Mississippi Legislature created the window in 2020. House Bill 1521 passed the House 118 to 1 in March and the Senate 51 to 0 in June. The House then refused to accept the Senate’s changes and the bill went to a conference committee. The vote for the version that became law was closer. The House adopted the conference report 97 to 14 on June 28 and the Senate adopted it 31 to 14 the next day. Every senator who voted against it was a Democrat. It was signed into law on July 8.
The act’s title set the rule in plain terms: that absentee ballots received by mail must be “postmarked by the date of the election and received by the registrar no more than five business days after the election.” That language is now carried in Section 23-15-637 of the state code. The same act opened absentee voting to Mississippians under a physician-imposed COVID-19 quarantine in 2020.
The Republican National Committee sued to strike it down, arguing that federal law setting a single Election Day leaves no room for a state to count ballots that arrive afterward. The Fifth Circuit agreed in 2024 in Republican National Committee v. Wetzel and held that the Mississippi statute preempted.
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling on June 29. “Nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court. She was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, and by Justice Brett Kavanaugh in all but two parts. “Election day is a specified date, not a span of multiple days,” Alito wrote.
The case reached the court as Watson v. Republican National Committee, after Secretary of State Michael Watson, who defended the statute that his state’s legislature passed.
Absentee ballots have been available in circuit clerks’ offices since Sept. 19, 2026, and in-person absentee voting opened Sept. 21. It closes at noon on Oct. 31. Resolution boards can begin processing absentee ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day and counties can begin tabulating at 7 p.m.
Election Day is Nov. 3. The relevant receipt deadline is Nov. 10.
Image: Screencap from Secretary of State website
