Trump Wants Mail Votes to Arrive By Election Day. Red States Are Rushing to Toe the Line.

Frustrated by slowing mail delivery, particularly in rural areas, the Kansas legislature in 2017 passed a law to let elections officials count mail ballots that arrived after Election Day, for up to three extra days, so long as the ballots were postmarked before polls closed. Kansas politicos joined other states with such a policy in calling this a “grace period.” 

“Because that’s exactly what it was,” Jamie Shew, the clerk and top elections official in Douglas County, home to the city of Lawrence, told Bolts last week. “It was providing some grace for someone who did what they were supposed to do. We wanted to make sure those ballots counted.”

The reform drew zero committee testimony in opposition. Lawmakers voted 163-1 for it. Even Kansas’ then-secretary of state, Republican Kris Kobach, a longtime champion of voter restrictions who that same year helped run President Trump’s commission to investigate election fraud, wrote a letter of support: Kansans voting by mail need a little wiggle room, he told lawmakers, as a result of the U.S. Postal Service reducing processing sites in the state.

“There was universal acceptance because it just made sense,” said Shew, who helped draft the legislation and is now in his third decade as county clerk. 

This was a popular line of thought around the country, and by the 2020 election nearly half of U.S. states—blue, red, and swing alike—had adopted their own grace-period laws. 

Fast forward to this year: Republican politicians nationwide now can’t stand grace periods. 

This past March alone brought news that two states—Kansas among them—will repeal their grace periods; that conservative federal judges are on the brink of killing grace periods in two other states; and that Trump, who for years has falsely alleged rampant mail-voting fraud, wants to pressure the rest of the nation to reject every mail ballot that arrives after polls close. 

In Kansas, the Republicans who control the statehouse passed a bill this spring to end the grace period they’d created in 2017. In elections starting in 2026, any mail ballot received after 7 p.m. on Election Day will be tossed, even if it was postmarked in time.

Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, but Republicans had enough votes to override her. The bill, Kelly wrote in a veto letter, would “disenfranchise thousands of Kansas voters,” and constitutes “an attack” on rural voters because mail service is often slower for them than for people in cities.

Utah Republicans adopted a similar change just two weeks before Kansas, ending their state’s grace period amid a broad crackdown on mail voting. West Virginia is considering a bill to join them. 

Trump singled out grace periods in his sweeping March 25 executive order on elections, ordering the Department of Justice to take “all necessary action” against states that allow them. He argued that these states are violating the federal statute requiring congressional elections to take place on the first Tuesday of November in even-numbered years. But that statute says nothing about dates for other elections, and, regardless, election law experts told Bolts the White House has no authority to command the rejection of ballots that arrive after Election Day. Trump’s order provided no detail on how he intends to do so.

Election administrators around the country quickly denounced Trump’s attack on grace periods, and his order broadly, as a dramatic, unconstitutional overreach. Multiple groups, including a coalition of 19 state attorneys general, have already sued.

Trump, in his order, said of grace periods: “This is like allowing persons who arrive 3 days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared, to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd.” 

His analogy is logically unsound, because a ballot that arrives after Election Day in a state with a grace period is only counted if it was postmarked on or before Election Day, prior to the posting of any result. But Trump was echoing an increasingly popular line of thinking among U.S. conservatives: that someone who submits a ballot by mail hasn’t actually voted until that ballot arrives.

A panel on the Fifth Circuit, the arch-conservative federal appeals court that covers parts of the South, sided with the Republican National Committee last fall in its lawsuit against Mississippi’s grace period. “[Mississippi’s] problem is that it thinks a ballot can be ‘cast’ before it is received,” the ruling read, adding later that it should be “obvious that a ballot is ‘cast’ when the State takes custody of it.” 

Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law and election law expert, has called it a “bonkers opinion.”

“Requiring that people vote by election day is not the same as saying their ballots must be received by election day. Every other court to face these cases has rejected this argument,” Hasen wrote in Election Law Blog in October.

The Fifth Circuit last month declined to reconsider this ruling, leaving it in place pending a possible appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The October ruling, rather than immediately banning Mississippi’s grace period, sent the matter back to a lower court; still, the state law is now at the mercy of an injunction by a federal judge.

The Fifth Circuit’s stance also threatens the status quo in Texas, the only other state within the circuit’s jurisdiction that allows a grace period for its mail ballots.

There is real potential impact to voters as judges and lawmakers tighten or eliminate grace periods: Already, plenty of states reject close to—or sometimes more than—1 percent of mail ballots for arriving after deadlines, and voting experts tell Bolts they expect that share to grow as more states end their grace periods.

Research shows that younger voters and non-white voters—populations that tend to favor Democrats—cast their ballots later on average than other groups. This explains why the count of ballots that have arrived after Election Day has historically often favored Democratic candidates, a so-called “blue shift” that has long fueled baseless conspiracy theorists in some corners of the right. “It just defies logic to me,” then-U.S. Speaker Paul Ryan said in the fall of 2018 about these Democratic gains. 

Still, Republican politicians were mostly comfortable embracing mail voting until the 2020 presidential election, when Trump came to consistently attack the method as being rife with fraud. In the ensuing years, his allies have sought (successfully, in many cases) to curtail vote-by-mail, including by limiting drop boxes and making it more difficult for some voters to obtain mail ballots. 

The blue lean of later-cast ballots adds to the fact that mail ballots overall lean generally in Democrats’ favor, a trend that holds true in Kansas: 11 percent of Democratic voters there voted by mail in 2024, compared to 6 percent of Republican voters, according to The Associated Press. Kansas’s soon-to-vanish grace period allowed roughly 2,100 voters to be counted last year, the AP reported. 

Those voters accounted for only about 0.2 percent of total Kansas voters in the fall, but voting rights advocates argued that the relatively small percentage does not diminish the consequence of the grace-period ban. For one, they said, local elections in Kansas, as elsewhere, are sometimes decided by tiny margins that could be swayed by discounting late-arriving mail ballots.

Moreover, Mike Fonkert, deputy director of the organization Kansas Appleseed, told Bolts this week, “It’s a matter of principle. When legitimate voters cast legitimate votes, we should do everything in our power to collect those votes.”

Fonkert worries that mail delivery times are now increasing, which means that more people may be disenfranchised in the future. The Postal Service last month announced massive staff cuts as Trump signals a desire to take over and possibly privatize the agency, adding to the worry. 

Shew, the Douglas County clerk, said that his office finds that it takes the Postal Service an average of 7-9 days to deliver mail ballots to Lawrence voters. Since he, like the rest of Kansas’ local elections officials, can only begin sending out ballots 20 days before elections, that kind of delay leaves voters who plan to submit ballots by mail with precious little time. 

“We often joke we could walk to people’s houses faster than it gets there by mail,” Shew said. “So, if it takes seven days to arrive, now you’re down to 13 days. We have to tell people, ‘Do not spend a lot of time on your ballot, do not hold it.’ Because if it’s seven days to get there and seven to get back, that’s basically three days to vote.”

By eliminating its grace period, Kansas has reduced its mail-voting window from 23 days to 20—now tied with Iowa as the shortest such period in any U.S. state, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Beyond their acute concerns over grace-period bans, voting rights advocates are wary of how these changes fit into broader restrictions on voter access. Barbara Smith-Warner, a former Democratic Oregon state lawmaker who promotes mail voting as the director of the National Vote-at-Home Institute, was one of several voting experts who told Bolts that grace periods are merely one battle in the GOP’s war to eliminate vote-by-mail altogether.

“You can cover it in nice language—We want to count the votes sooner, so they should be received sooner—but it’s a good way to kill two birds with one stone,” she said. “You weaken and decrease voting at home with mail ballots, and you lay the groundwork for going back to the fantasy, 1950s idea of everyone only voting on one day with paper ballots.”

This is no imagined threat; the Kansas lawmaker who sponsored the grace-period ban this spring has said he wants to end mail-voting, with only very narrow exceptions.

“If it was up to me, Election Day would be Election Day,” Republican Representative Pat Proctor, the repeal sponsor, said earlier this year, according to leaked video obtained by the Kansas advocacy group Loud Light and published by Kansas Reflector. “There wouldn’t be early voting. Mail-in ballots would only be for military or severely disabled.”

“But I got to bring 84 people with me,” he added, referencing the number needed to reach a veto-proof supermajority in the Kansas House, “so I’m trying to chip away at it.”

Proctor last week announced he is running in 2026 for Kansas secretary of state, a job that would hand him power to supervise elections and create certain statewide rules for their conduct.

Critics of Proctor’s anti-grace period legislation have stressed that it’s always taken several weeks after an election to count and certify all votes.

“Election Day has never been Election Day,” Shew said. “Anything we have on Tuesday is an unofficial vote. It’s never been that all the votes on Election Day represent all the votes.”

The ranking Democratic member on the elections committee Proctor chairs, state Representative Kirk Haskins, told Bolts he believes his Republican colleagues know this, but have larger aims in mind.

“No matter how you slice it, it’s about voter suppression,” he said. “They just want to create fear and to control who will vote. That seems to be the trend.”