2 WATSON v. REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE Syllabus to five days thereafter; nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day. Pp. 5–21. (a) The question before the Court is narrow: whether counting ballots postmarked by election day, but received up to five days later, violates the federal election-day statutes. Plaintiffs do not challenge the general practice of absentee voting, the use of the Postal Service or common carrier to transmit ballots, early voting, or the counting and certification of votes after election day. The Court also does not consider the scope of Congress’s authority to regulate federal elections. P. 5. (b) The federal election-day statutes do not preempt Mississippi’s law because the defining element of an “election” has always been the electorate’s choice of candidate. And a related federal statute—the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA)— confirms that while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, state law governs when they must be received. It is a “fundamental canon of statutory construction that words generally should be interpreted as taking their ordinary meaning at the time Congress enacted the statute,” New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, 586 U. S. 105, 113 (internal quotation marks and ellipses omitted), and at all relevant points, the word “election” was understood to mean “[t]he act of choosing a person to fill an office,” N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language 433. The Court has likewise defined “election” as the expression of the electorate’s choice, explaining that “[f]rom time immemorial an election . . . has been . . . no more and no less than the expression by qualified electors of their choice of candidates.” United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 318. The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received. The most recent amendment to the Presidential election-day statute bears this out. While inserting the phrase “election day” into the statute and marking that date as a specific Tuesday, Congress also provided that when States “modif[y] the period of voting” in response to certain force majeure events, the term “election day” shall “include the modified period of voting.” 3 U. S. C. §21(1) (emphasis added). That Congress defined “election day” with reference to “voting” indicates that “voting” is the act governed by the statute. UOCAVA—which requires States to permit absent military and overseas voters to cast absentee ballots in federal elections and, as a backup, establishes a federal absentee voting system, 52 U. S. C. §20302(a)(1)—reinforces the point. In detailing this system, UOCAVA repeatedly presupposes ballot receipt is a matter of state law. For example, to avoid any double counting, UOCAVA provides that federal absentee ballots “shall not be counted” if a State receives the voter’s state absentee ballot by “the deadline for receipt of [that] ballot under